The trembling of the veil

ilXKILIT

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY Of
CALIFORNIA

THE TREMBLING
OF THE VEIL

PRIVATELY PRINTED BOOKS
(Uniform with this Volume)

THE STORY-TELLER'S HOLIDAY (George

Moore) July 1918

AVOWALS (George Moore) . . . September 1919
ESTHER WATERS (George Moore) . . October 1920
THE COMING OF GABRIELLE (George

Moore ) December 1920

HELOISE AND ABE"LARD (George Moore) February 1921
NINE TALES FROM " LES CONTES

DROLATIQUES " OF BALZAC . . November 1921

(Translated by Robert Crawford)
A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE IN A

STUDY OF HIS WORK (John

Freeman) «,.... May 1922

THE CAULDRON OF ANNWN (Thomas

Evelyn Ellis) .... June 1922

a picture 1w

The TREMBLING
of the VEIL ,

By
W. B. YEATS

LONDON

PRIVATELY PRINTED FOB SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY

T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD.
1922

To
JOHN QUINN

my friend and helper,

and friend and helper of certain people

mentioned in this book.

Add'!
GIFT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

re

THE
TREMBLING OF THE VEIL

This edition consists of one thousand
copies numbered and signed.

This is No

/

SOS

PREFACE

/ have found in an old diary a quotation from
Stephane Mallarme', saying that his epoch was troubled
by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As those
words were still true, during the years of my life
described in this book, I have chosen The Trembling
of the Veil for its title.

Except in one or two trivial details, where I have
the warrant of old friendship, I have not, without per-
mission, quoted conversation or described occurrence
from the private life of named or recognisable persons.
I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the
friends of my youth are dead and over the dead I have
an historian's rights. They were artists and writers
and certain among them men of genius, and the life of
a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is
often an experiment that needs analysis and record.
At least my generation so valued personality that it
thought so. I have said all the good I know and all
the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to under-
standing.

W. B. YEATS.

May, 192%.

Thoor Ballylee.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

•MB

FOUR YEARS 1887—1891 . 3

BOOK II
IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL . . 83

BOOK III
HODOS CAMELIONIS 135

BOOK IV
THE TRAGIC GENERATION .... 157

BOOK V
THE STIRRING OF THE BONES

vii

BOOK I
FOUR YEARS— 1887-1891

THE TREMBLING OF
THE VEIL

<$>#*&&&frG^^

FOUR YEARS
1887—1891

AT the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my
brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from
Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick
house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from
marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam,
a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great
horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there,
when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets
with great trees casting great shadows had been a new
enthusiasm : the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last
affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had
taken the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first
in modern London, were said to leak, which they did
not, and the drains to be bad, though that was no
longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap.
I remember feeling disappointed because the co-opera-
tive stores, with their little seventeenth century panes,
had lost the romance they had when I had passed them
still unfinished on my way to school ; and because the
public house, called The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn,

8

was so plainly a common public house; and because
the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the
Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some
inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never
pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the
wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of
the roof where nobody ever walked or could walk, to
remember the opinion of some architect friend of my
father's, that it had been put there to keep the birds
from falling off. Still, however, it had some village
characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost in the
metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular
habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morn-
ing I saw these words painted on a board in the porch :
" The congregation are requested to kneel during
prayers ; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon
pegs provided for the purpose." In front of every
seat hung a little cushion and these cushions were
called " kneelers." Presently the joke ran through
the community, where there were many artists who
considered religion at best an unimportant accessory
to good architecture and who disliked that particular
church.

II

I COULD not understand where the charm had gone
that I had felt, when as a school-boy of twelve or
thirteen I had played among the unfinished houses,
once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a
fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Some-
times I thought it was because these were real houses,
while my play had been among toy-houses some day to
be inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness
that one can see in picture books.

5

I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was
fifteen or sixteen my father had told me about Rossetti
and Blake and given me their poetry to read ; and once
at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante's
Dream in the gallery there, a picture painted when
Rossetti had lost his dramatic power and to-day not
very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its
romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures
away. It was a perpetual bewilderment that my
father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter,
now painted portraits of the first comer, children sell-
ing newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of
fish upon her head, and that when, moved perhaps by
some memory of his youth, he chose some theme from
poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it
unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit
and its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the
Paris art-schools. " We must paint what is in front
of us," or "A man must be of his own time," they
would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they
would point out his bad drawing and tell me to admire
Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they
were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for
nothing mattered but " knowing how to paint," being
in reaction against a generation that seemed to have
wasted its time upon so many things. I thought
myself alone in hating these young men, now indeed
getting towards middle life, their contempt for the
past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few
months I was to discover others of my own age, who
thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks
before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled
soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the
present, where its elders are %o obviously powerful and
no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.

Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty
hidden among oak leaves, though from it certainly
does come so much proletarian rhetoric ?

I was unlike others of my generation in one thing
only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley
and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded
religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion,
almost an infallible church out of poetic tradition :
a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions,
inseparable from their first expression, passed on from
generation to generation by poets and painters with
some help from philosophers and theologians. I
wished for a world, where I could discover this tradi-
tion perpetually, and not in pictures and in poems
only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the
hangings that kept out the draught. I had even
created a dogma : " Because those imaginary people
are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be
his measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine
those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to
truth." When I listened they seemed always to speak
of one thing only : they, their loves, every incident of
their lives, were steeped in the supernatural. Could
even Titian's "Ariosto" that I loved beyond other por-
traits have its grave look, as if waiting for some per-
fect final event, if the painters before Titian had not
learned portraiture, while painting into the corner of
compositions full of saints and Madonnas, their kneel-
ing patrons ? At seventeen years old I was already an
old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing
had kept me from going off but a doubt as to my
capacity to shoot straight.

HI

I WAS not an industrious student and knew only what
I had found by accident and I found nothing I cared
for after Titian, and Titian I knew from an imitation
of his Supper of Emmaus in Dublin, till Blake and
the Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's friends
were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to
Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first building
and others to be near those that had. There was
Todhunter, a well-off man who had bought my father's
pictures while my father was still Pre-Raphaelite ; once
a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of
poetical plays ; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a
good scholar and a good intellect; and with him my
father carried on a warm exasperated friendship, fed I
think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over
matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the
most dejected and the least estranged, and I remember
encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to
buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He
displayed it without strong liking and would have
agreed had there been any to find fault. If he had
liked anything strongly he might have been a famous
man, for a few years later he was to write, under some
casual patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now
in all Irish anthologies ; but with him every book was a
new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough.
He had I think no peace in himself. But my father's
chief friend was York Powell, a famous Oxford Pro-
fessor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, brown-
bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking,
but for his glasses and the dim sight of a student, like
some captain in the merthant service. One often

passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to
that of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace.
He cared nothing for philosophy, nothing for econo-
mics, nothing for the policy of nations; for history,
as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing
or exciting to think about. He impressed all who met
him, and seemed to some a man of genius, but he had
not enough ambition to shape his thought, or convic-
tion to give rhythm to his style and remained always
a poor writer. I was too full of unfinished specula-
tions and premature convictions to value rightly his
conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which
would give itself to every casual association of speech
and company, precisely because he had neither cause
nor design. My father, however, found Powell's con-
crete narrative manner in talk a necessary completion
of his own, and when I asked him in a letter many
years later where he got his philosophy replied " from
York Powell " and thereon added, no doubt remem-
bering that Powell was without ideas, " by looking
at him." Then there was a good listener, a painter
in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his student
days of Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian
court, an orange and a skin of wine at his side, blue
mountains towering behind; but who lived by draw-
ing domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly
magazine that had an immense circulation among the
imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom of
work, which he never turned to but under pressure of
necessity and usually late at night, with the pub-
lisher's messenger in the hall, he had half-filled his
studio with mechanical toys, of his own invention, and
perpetually increased their number. A model rail-
way train at intervals puffed its way along the walls,
passing several railway stations and signal boxes ; and

on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending
soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the
attackers fired a pea through a certain window ; while
a large model of a Thames barge hung from the ceil-
ing. Opposite our house lived an old artist who
worked also for the illustrated papers for a living, but
painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of him I re-
member nothing except that he had outlived ambition,
was a good listener, and that my father explained his
gaunt appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If
all these men were a little like becalmed ships, there
was certainly one man whose sails were full. Three
or four doors off on our side of the road lived a decora-
tive artist in all the naive confidence of popular ideals
and the public approval. He was our daily comedy.
66 1 myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest
decorative artists of the age," was among his sayings,
and a great Lych-gate, bought from some country
church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelter
bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front
garden to show that he at any rate knew nothing of
discouragement. In this fairly numerous company —
there were others though no other face rises before
me — my father and York Powell found listeners for a
conversation that had no special loyalties, or anta-
gonisms ; while I could only talk upon set topics, being
in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled me
with excitement were never spoken of.

IV

BEDFORD Park had a red brick clubhouse with a
little theatre that began to stir my imagination. I

10

persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and have
it performed there.

A couple of years before, while we were still in
Dublin, he had given at Hengler's Circus, remodelled
as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive performance of
his Helena of Troas, an oratorical Swinburnian play
which I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable.
Since I was seventeen I had constantly tested my own
ambition with Keats Js praise of him who " left great
verses to a little clan," so it was but natural that I
should spend an evening persuading him that we had
nothing to do with the great public, that it should be
a point of honour to be content with our own little
public, that he should write of shepherds and shep-
herdesses because people would expect them to talk
poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his
Sicilian Idyll, which I have not looked at for thirty
years, and never rated very high as poetry, and had
the one unmistakable success of his life. The little
theatre was full for twice the number of performances
intended, for artists, men of letters and students had
come from all over London.

I made through these performances a close friend
and a discovery that was to influence my life. Tod-
hunter had engaged several professional actors with a
little reputation, but had given the chief woman's,
part to Florence Farr, who had qualities no contem-.
porary professional practice could have increased,
the chief man's part to an amateur, Heron Allen,
solicitor, fiddler and popular writer on palmistry.
Heron Allen and Florence Farr read poetry for their
pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else
could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music,
the poetry acquired a nobility, a passionate austerity
that made it seem akin for certain moments to the

11

great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had
never spoken in public before except to lecture upon
the violin, had the wisdom to reduce his acting to a
series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with not
more gesture than was needed to " twitch his mantle
blue " and to let his grace be foil to Florence Farr's
more impassioned delivery. When they closed their
mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking
up the verse to make it conversational, jerking his
body or his arms that he might seem no austere
poetical image but very man, I listened in raging
hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my
memory for insulting phrases, I even muttered them
to myself that the people about might hear. I had
discovered for the first time that in the performance
of all drama that depends for its effect upon beauty of
language, poetical culture may be more important
than professional experience.

Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty
minutes' walk away at Brook Green, and I was soon a
constant caller, talking over plays that I would some
day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil
beauty like that of Demeter's image near the British
Museum reading room door, and an incomparable sense
of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural
expression of the image. And yet there was scarce
another gift that she did not value above those three.
We all have our simplifying image, our genius, and
such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the
praise of others, we would deride it and hunt it away.
She could only express hers through an unfashionable
art, an art that has scarce existed since the seventeenth
century, and so could only earn unimportant occa-
sional praise. She would dress without care or calcu-
lation as if to hide her beauty and seem contemptuous

12

of its power. If a man fell in love with her she
would notice that she had seen just that movement
upon the stage or had heard just that intonation and
all seemed unreal. If she read out some poem in
English or in French all was passion, all a traditional
splendour, but she spoke of actual things with a cold
wit or under the strain of paradox. Wit and paradox
alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition or
passion and she was soon to spend her days in the
British Museum reading room and become erudite in
many heterogeneous studies moved by an insatiable,
destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring
friendship that was an enduring exasperation — " why
do you play the part with a bent back and a squeak in
the voice? How can you be a character actor, you
who hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a
vision? " But argument was no use, and some Nurse
in Euripedes must be played with all an old woman's
infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil's
majesty, because "it is no use doing what nobody
wants," or because she would show that she (( could do
what the others did."

I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when
her worst mood was upon her, to a game called Spilli-
kens which I had seen played in my childhood with
little pieces of bone that you had to draw out with a
hook from a bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones
instead of Demeter's golden sheaf ! Her sitting room
at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a reflection
of her mind, the walls covered with musical instru-
ments, pieces of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods
and goddesses painted by herself in the British
Museum.

13

PRESENTLY a hansom drove up to our door at Bed
ford Park with Miss Maud Gonne, who brought an
introduction to my father from old John O'Leary, the
Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war,
war for its own sake, not as the creator of certain
virtues but as if there were some virtue in excitement
itself. I supported her against my father, which
vexed him the more, though he might have understood
that, apart from the fact that Carolus Duran and
Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so
young as I could not have differed from a woman so
beautiful and so young. To-day, with her great height
and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she
looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence
Farr, but in that day she seemed a classical impersona-
tion of the Spring, the Virgilian commendation " She
walks like a goddess " made for her alone. Her
complexion was luminous, like that of apple blossom
through which the light falls, and I remember her
standing that first day by a great heap of such blos-
soms in the window. In the next few years I saw her
always when she passed to and fro between Dublin
and Paris, surrounded, no matter how rapid her
journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by
cages full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs,
a parrot, and once a full-grown hawk from Donegal.
Once when I saw her to her railway carriage I noticed
how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and
wondered what her fellow travellers would say, but
the carriage remained empty. It was years before I
could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much
beauty and so much energj1.

14

VI

SOME quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park,
out on the high road to Richmond, lived W. E.
Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my
education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothen-
stein, hangs over my mantelpiece among portraits of
other friends. He is drawn standing, but because
doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, rest-
ing his elbows upon some slightly suggested object — a
table or a window-sill. His heavy figure and power-
ful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his
short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and
wrinkled face, his eyes steadily fixed upon some
object, in complete confidence and self-possession,
and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly
as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and
they too show him exactly as I remember him, as
though he had but one appearance and that seen fully
at the first glance and by all alike. He was most
human — human I used to say like one of Shakes-
peare's characters — and yet pressed and pummelled,
as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture
and a speech as by some overwhelming situation. I
disagreed with him about everything, but I admired
him beyond words. With the exception of some
early poems founded upon old French models I dis-
liked his poetry, mainly because he wrote in vers libre,
which I associated with Tyndall and Huxley, and
Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant
eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpas-
sioned description of an hospital ward where his leg
had been amputated. I wanted the strongest pas-
sions, passions that had nothing to do with observa-

15

tion, sung in metrical forms that seemed old enough to
be sung by men half -asleep or riding upon a journey.
Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some
people are affected by a cat in the room, and though
he professed himself at our first meeting without
political interests or convictions, he soon grew into a
violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when
I spoke of his poems : " He is like a great actor with
a bad part ; yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave
scene if Salvini played the grave-digger? " and I
might so have explained much that he said and did.
I meant that he was like a great actor of passion —
character-acting meant nothing to me for many years
— and an actor of passion will display some one quality
of soul, personified again and again, just as a great
poetical painter, Titian, Botticelli, Rossetti, may
depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty which
presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the
sort on the English stage, and in modern England and
France it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in
the expression of intellectual pride and though I saw
Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a
kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate —
" I am very costive," he would say — beset with per-
sonal quarrels, built up an image of power and mag-
nanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it
were by lightning, his true self. Half his opinions
were the contrivance of a sub-consciousness that
sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis and
expression to that point of artifice where the true self
could find its tongue. Without opponents there had
been no drama, and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre-
Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's generation,
were the only possible opponents. How could one
resent his prejudice when, that he himself might play

16

a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout,
whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could
imagine moulded like himself ? Once he said to me in
the height of his imperial propaganda, " Tell those
young men in Ireland that this great thing must go
on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government,
but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other Euro-
pean country, but we cannot grant it." And then he
spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin news-
paper. It would have expounded the Gaelic propa-
ganda then beginning, though Dr Hyde had, as yet,
no league, our old stories, our modern literature —
everything that did not demand any shred or patch of
government. He dreamed of a tyranny, but it was
that of Cosimo de' Medici.

vn

WE gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with
folding doors between, and hung, I think, with photo-
graphs from Dutch masters, and in one room there
was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can
recall but one elderly man — Dunn his name was —
rather silent and full of good sense, an old friend of
Henley's. We were young men, none as yet estab-
lished in his own, or in the world's opinion, and Henley
was our leader and our confidant. One evening, I
found him alone amused and exasperated : " Young

A ," he cried " has just been round to ask my

advice. Would I think it a wise thing if he bolted

with Mrs B ? ' Have you quite determined to do

it ? ' I asked him. ' Quite.' ' Well,' I said, « in that
case I refuse to give you any advice.' ' Mrs B

17

was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the Welsh
Triad said of Guinievere, " was much given to being
carried off." I think we listened to him, and often
obeyed him, partly because he was quite plainly not
upon the side of our parents. We might have a
different ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more
important than the ground, and his confident manner
and speech made us believe, perhaps for the first time,
in victory. And besides, if he did denounce, and in
my case he certainly did, what we held in secret rever-
ence, he never failed to associate it with things or
persons that did not move us to reverence. Once I
found him just returned from some art congress in
Liverpool or in Manchester. " The salvation armyism
of art," he called it, and gave a grotesque description
of some city councillor he had found admiring Turner.
Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon
derided Turner, and finding the city councillor the next
day on the other side of the gallery, admiring some
Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that Pre-Raphaelite.
The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a
chair in the middle of the room staring disconsolately
upon the floor. He terrified us also and certainly I
did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to speak
our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but
he made us feel always our importance, and no man
among us could do good work, or show the promise of
it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a
Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame,
author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well-
known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a
famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet
minister and Irish chief secretary, and now or later
Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than the
rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and
B

18

while faces that I met but once may rise clearly before
me, a face met on many a Sunday has perhaps
vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I
never met him; and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I
knew well elsewhere but not there, said — " I cannot
go more than once a year, it is too exhausting."
Henley got the best out of us all, because he had made
us accept him as our judge and we knew that his
judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the
antithesis that is the foundation of human nature being
ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs as though he
were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other

men to use ; and certainly I always thought of C ,

a fine classical scholar, a pale and seemingly gentle
man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When
Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first The Scots,
afterwards The National Observer, this young man
wrote articles and reviews notorious for savage wit;
and years afterwards when The National Observer was
dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty,
I met him in Paris very sad and I think very poor.
" Nobody will employ me now," he said. " Your
master is gone," I answered, " and you are like the
spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped
in poppy-juice that it might not go about killing people
on its own account." I wrote my first good lyrics and
tolerable essays for The National Observer, and as I
always signed my work could go my own road in some
measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, crossing out
a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I
was comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kip-
ling then in the first flood of popularity. At first,
indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten and thought
that others were not, and only began investigation

19

when the editorial characteristics — epigrams,
archaisms, and all — appeared in the article upon Paris
fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian
Pasha. I was not compelled to full conformity for
verse is plainly stubborn ; and in prose, that I might
avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but
ghost or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or
some pilot at Rosses Point and Henley saw that I must
needs mix a palette fitted to my subject matter. But
if he had changed every " has " into " hath " I would
have let him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his
generosity? "My young men outdo me and they
write better than I," he wrote in some letter praising
Charles Whibley's work, and to another friend with a
copy of my Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland : " See
what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads."

VIII

MY first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonish-
ment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect
sentences, as if he had written them all over night with
labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present
that night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of
accident, a man full of the secret spite of dulness, who
interrupted from time to time, and always to check or
disorder thought ; and I noticed with what mastery he
was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the im-
pression of artificiality that I think all Wilde's
listeners have recorded came from the perfect round-
ing of the sentences and from the deliberation that
made it possible. That very impression helped him,
as the effect of metre, or of. the antithetical prose of

20

the seventeenth century, which is itself a true metre,
helped its writers, for he could pass without incon-
gruity from some unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to
elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later :
" Give me The Winter's Tale, ' Daffodils that come
before the swallow dare ' but not King Lear. What is
King Lear but poor life staggering in the fog?" and
the slow, carefully modulated cadence sounded natural
to my ears. That first night he praised Walter
Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance :
" It is my golden book ; I never travel anywhere with-
out it ; but it is the very flower of decadence : the last
trumpet should have sounded the moment it was
written." " But," said the dull man, " would you
not have given us time to read it? " " Oh no," was
the retort, " there would have been plenty of time
afterwards — in either world." I think he seemed to
us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a
triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from
another age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century
figure. A few weeks before I had heard one of my
father's friends, an official in a publishing firm that
had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blam-
ing Henley who was " no use except under control "
and praising Wilde, " so indolent but such a genius " ;
and now the firm became the topic of our talk.
" How often do you go to the office? " said Henley.
" I used to go three times a week," said Wilde, " for
an hour a day but I have since struck off one of the
days." " My God," said Henley, " I went five times
a week for five hours a day and when I wanted to strike
off a day they had a special committee meeting."
" Furthermore," was Wilde's answer, "I never
answered their letters. I have known men come to
London full of bright prospects and seen them com-

21

plete wrecks in a few months through a habit of
answering letters." He too knew how to keep our
elders in their place, and his method was plainly the
more successful, for Henley had been dismissed.
" No he is not an aesthete," Henley commented later,
being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's Pre-Raphael-
ite entanglement ; " one soon finds that he is a
scholar and a gentleman." And when I dined
with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at
once, " I had to strain every nerve to equal that
man at all " ; and I was too loyal to speak my
thought : " You and not he said all the brilliant
things." He like the rest of us had felt the strain
of an intensity that seemed to hold life at the point of
drama. He had said on that first meeting " The basis
of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl " ;
and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends
till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diversity
of character and ambition pushed them apart, and,
with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing the
poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly
lost that first admiration, for after Wilde's downfall
he said to me : " Why did he do it? I told my lads
to attack him and yet we might have fought under his
banner."

IX

IT became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bed-
ford Park, to say that R. A. M. Stevenson, who
frequented both circles, was the better talker. Wilde
had been trussed up like a turkey by undergraduates,
dragged up and down a hill, his champagne emptied
into the ice tub, hooted in the 'streets of various towns,

22

and I think stoned, and no newspaper named him but
in scorn ; his manner had hardened to meet opposition
and at times he allowed one to see an unpardonable
insolence. His charm was acquired and systematized,
a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while
the charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour
of his hair. If Stevenson's talk became monologue
we did not know it, because our one object was to show
by our attention that he need never leave off. If
thought failed him we would not combat what he had
said, or start some new theme, but would encourage
him with a question; and one felt that it had been
always so from childhood up. His mind was full of
phantasy for phantasy's sake and he gave as good
entertainment in monologue as his cousin Robert Louis
in poem or story. He was always " supposing " ;
" Suppose you had two millions what would you do
with it ? " and " Suppose you were in Spain and in
love how would you propose? " I recall him one
afternoon at our house at Bedford Park, surrounded
by my brother and sisters and a little group of my
father's friends, describing proposals in half a dozen
countries. There your father did it, dressed in such
and such a way with such and such words, and there
a friend must wait for the lady outside the chapel
door, sprinkle her with holy water and say, " My
friend Jones is dying for love of you." But when it
was over those quaint descriptions, so full of laughter
and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as
something alien from one's own life, like a dance I
once saw in a great house, where beautifully dressed
children wound a long ribbon in and out as they
danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I
think because he had written a book in praise of
Velasquez, praise at that time universal wherever Pre-

28

Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had to
pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted,
Velasquez seemed the first bored celebrant of boredom.
I was convinced from some obscure meditation that
Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to
my elders and to the indifferent world, as though it
were right for old men, and unambitious men and all
women, to be content with charm and humour. It
was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when
Wilde said : " Mr Bernard Shaw has no enemies but
is intensely disliked by all his friends," I knew it to
be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged
upon a notorious hater of romance, whose generosity
and courage I could not fathom.

I SAW a good deal of Wilde at that time— was it
1887 or 1888 ? — I have no way of fixing the date ex-
cept that I had published my first book The Wander-
ings of Usheen and that Wilde had not yet published
his Decay of Lying. He had, before our first meeting,
reviewed my book and despite its vagueness of inten-
tion, and the inexactness of its speech, praised with-
out qualification ; and what was worth more than any
review he had talked about it and now he asked me to
eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I
imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just
renounced his velveteen, and even those cuffs turned
backward over the sleeves, and had begun to dress very
carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in
a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had
decorated with an elegance* that owed something to

24

Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor Pre-
Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat
gold, no peacock blue, no dark background. I re-
member vaguely a white drawing room with Whistler
etchings, " let in " to white panels, and a dining room
all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for
a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of
the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I think a
red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little
above the statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its
unity, his past of a few years before had gone too com-
pletely, and I remember thinking that the perfect
harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and
his two young children, suggested some deliberate
artistic composition.

He commended and dispraised himself during dinner
by attributing characteristics like his own to his
country : " We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we
are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the
greatest talkers since the Greeks." When dinner was
over he read me from the proofs of The Decay of Lying
and when he came to the sentence : " Schopenhauer has
analysed the pessimism that characterises modern
thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has
become sad because a puppet was once melancholy," I
said, " Why do you change ' sad ' to 6 melancholy '?"
He replied that he wanted a full sound at the close of
his sentence, and I thought it no excuse and an example
of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his writing for
me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was
the mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairy tale,
had he words exact enough to hold a subtle ear. He
alarmed me, though not as Henley did, for I never left
his house thinking myself fool or dunce. He flattered
the intellect of every man he liked; he made me tell

25

him long Irish stories and compared my art of story-
telling to Homer's; and once when he had described
himself as writing in the census paper " age 19, pro-
fession genius, infirmity talent " the other guest, a
young journalist fresh from Oxford or Cambridge,
said, " What should I have written? " and was told
that it should have been " profession talent, infirmity
genius." When, however, I called, wearing shoes a
little too yellow — unblackened leather had just become
fashionable — I realized their extravagance when I saw
his eyes fixed upon them ; and another day Wilde asked
me to tell his little boy a fairy story, and I had but got
as far as " Once upon a time there was a giant " when
the little boy screamed and ran out of the room.
Wilde looked grave and I was plunged into the shame
of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked
for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper,
that paid me a few shillings a month, he explained very
explicitly that writing literary gossip was no job for a
gentleman.

Though to be compared to Homer passed the time
pleasantly, I had not been greatly perturbed had he
stopped me with : " Is it a long story? " as Henley
would certainly have done. I was abashed before him
as wit and man of the world alone. I remember that
he deprecated the very general belief in his success or
his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form
of success had gone : he was no more the lion of the
season and he had not discovered his gift for writing
comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest
moment of his life. No scandal had touched his name,
his fame as a talker was growing among his equals, and
he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own spon-
taneity. One day he began : " I have been inventing
a Christian heresy," and Ije told a detailed story, in

26

the style of some early father, of how Christ recovered
after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb,
lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who
knew the falsehood of Christianity. Once St Paul
visited his town and he alone in the carpenters' quarter
did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters
noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he
kept his hands covered. A few days afterwards I
found Wilde with smock frocks in various colours
spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a
missionary explained that he did not object to the
heathen going naked upon week days, but insisted
upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock
frocks in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had
reached Central Africa might select a colour; so
Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious
ecclesiastic solemnity.

XI

OF late years I have often explained Wilde to myself
by his family history. His father was a friend or
acquaintance of my father's father and among my
family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle : " Why
are Sir William Wilde's nails so black? " Answer,
" Because he has scratched himself." And there is an
old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde say-
ing to a servant, " Why do you put the plates on the
coal-scuttle? What are the chairs meant for? "
They were famous people and there are many like
stories ; and even a horrible folk story, the invention
of some Connaught peasant, that tells how Sir William
Wilde took out the eyes of some men, who had come
to consult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a

27

plate, intending to replace them in a moment, and how
the eyes were eaten by a cat. As a certain friend of
mine, who has made a prolonged study of the nature of
cats, said when he first heard the tale, " Cats love
eyes." The Wilde family was clearly of the sort that
fed the imagination of Charles Lever, dirty, untidy,
daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more nor-
mal activities, might not have valued so highly, very
imaginative and learned. Lady Wilde, who when I
knew her received her friends with blinds drawn and
shutters closed that none might see her withered face,
longed always perhaps, though certainly amid much
self-mockery, for some impossible splendour of charac-
ter and circumstance. She lived near her son in level
Chelsea, but I have heard her say, " I want to live on-
some high place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because
I was an eagle in my youth." I think her son lived
with no self -mockery at all an imaginary life ; perpetu-
ally performed a play which was in all things the oppo-
site of all that he had known in childhood and early
youth ; never put off completely his wonder at opening
his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house, and
in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a
duchess, and that he delighted in Flaubert and Pater,
read Homer in the original and not as a schoolmaster
reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that
because of all that half-civilized blood in his veins he
could not endure the sedentary toil of creative art
and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for the
sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his
masters, turning their easel painting into painted
scenes. He was a parvenu, but a parvenu whose whole
bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in
The House of Pomegranates to a lady of title, it was
but to show that he wa§ Jack and the social ladder

28

his pantomime beanstalk. " Did you ever hear him
say * Marquess of Dimmesdale ' ? " a friend of his
once asked me. " He does not say ' the Duke of
York ' with any pleasure."

He told me once that he had been offered a safe
seat in Parliament and, had he accepted, he might
have had a career like that of Beaconsfield, whose
early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for
excitement, for hurried decisions, for immediate
triumphs. Such men get their sincerity, if at all, from
the contact of events; the dinner table was Wilde's
event and made him the greatest talker of his tune,
and his plays and dialogues have what merit they
possess from being now an imitation, now a record,
of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend
him by saying that his very admiration for his pre-
decessors in poetry, for Browning, for Swinburne and
Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a very young
man, made any success seem impossible that could
satisfy his immense ambition : never but once before
had the artist seemed so great, never had the work of
art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him
with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael
Angelo, found nothing left to do so satisfactory as to
turn bravo and quarrel with the man who broke
Michael Angelo's nose.

XII

I CANNOT remember who first brought me to the old
stable beside Kelmscott House, William Morris's house
at Hammersmith, and to the debates held there upon
Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon
of the little group who had supper with Morris after-

wards. I met at these suppers very constantly
Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with
Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and
less constantly Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the
Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps but once or twice
Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince
Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more
or less educated workmen, rough of speech and
manner, with a conviction to meet every turn. I was
told by one of them, on a night when I had done per-
haps more than my share of the talking, that I had
talked more nonsense in one evening than he had heard
in the whole course of his past life. I had merely
preferred Parnell, then at the height of his career, to
Michael Davitt, who had wrecked his Irish influence by
international politics. We sat round a long un-
polished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a
room where hung Rossetti's Pomegranate, a por-
trait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall and part of
the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet.
Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were
meant for people who took their shoes off when they
entered a house and were most in place upon a tent
floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for
Morris was an old man content at last to gather beau-
tiful things rather than to arrange a beautiful house.
I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone
all my sense of decoration, founded upon the back-
ground of Rossetti's pictures, was satisfied by a big
cupboard painted with a scene from Chaucer by
Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a
chair or a little table, that seemed accidental, bought
hurriedly perhaps and with little thought, to make
wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy,
in books belonging to my father, the third volume of

80

The Earthly Paradise, and The Defence of Guenevere,
which pleased me less, but had not opened either for
a long time. The Man Who Never Laughed Again
had seemed the most wonderful of tales till
my father had accused me of preferring Morris to
Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out
of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for
now I questioned while I read and at last ceased to
read ; nor had Morris written as yet those prose
romances that became after his death so great a joy
that they were the only books I was ever to read
slowly that I might not come too quickly to the end.
It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and
I took to him first because of some little tricks of
speech and body that reminded me of my old grand-
father in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity
and joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do
not set his poetry very high, but for an odd altogether
wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if some angel
offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life,
poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man's.
A reproduction of his portrait by Watts hangs over
my mantelpiece with Henley's, and those of other
friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of
some dreaming beast, remind me of the open eyes of
Titian's " Ariosto," while the broad vigorous body
suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to re-
main sane, though it give itself to every phantasy :
the dreamer of the middle ages. It is " the fool of
fairy . . . wide and wild as a hill," the resolute
European image that yet half remembers Buddha's
motionless meditation, and has no trait in common
with the wavering, lean image of hungry speculation,
that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain
famous Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself

81

foreshadowed a symbolic change, that shows a change
in the whole temperament of the world, for though he
called his Hamlet " fat " and even " scant of breath,"
he thrust between his fingers agile rapier and
dagger.

The dream world of Morris was as much the anti-
thesis of daily life as with other men of genius, but he
was never conscious of the antithesis and so knew
nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, un-
exhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly at
the service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased
he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if
style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he
could not have made them otherwise without ceasing
to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market,
if the woof were learned, his age offered him a speech,
exhausted from abstraction, that only returned to its
full vitality when written learnedly and slowly.

The roots of his antithetical dream were visible
enough : a never idle man of great physical strength
and extremely irascible — did he not fling a badly baked
plum pudding through the window upon Christmas
Day? — a man more joyous than any intellectual man
of our world, called himself " the idle singer of an
empty day," created new forms of melancholy, and
faint persons, like the knights and ladies of Burne-
Jones, who are never, no not once in forty volumes, put
out of temper. A blunderer who had said to the only un-
converted man at a Socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove
that equality came easy, " I was brought up a gentle-
man and now as you can see associate with all sorts "
and left wounds thereby that rankled after twenty
years, a man of whom I have heard it said " He is
always afraid that he is doing something wrong and

generally is," wrote long stories with apparently no
other object than that his persons might show to one
another, through situations of poignant difficulty the
most exquisite tact.

He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an
image of himself, because having all his imagination
set upon making and doing he had little self know-
ledge. He imagined instead new conditions of mak-
ing and doing; and in the teeth of those scientific
generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some
like imagining in every great change, believing that
the first flying fish first leaped, not because it sought
" adaptation " to the air, but out of horror of the
sea.

XIII

SOON after I began to attend the lectures a French
class was started in the old coach-house for certain
young Socialists who planned a tour in France, and I
joined it, and was for a time a model student con-
stantly encouraged by the compliments of the old
French mistress. I told my father of the class, and he
asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made diffi-
culties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew
that the new and admirable self I was making would
turn, under family eyes, into plain rag-doll. How
could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry
dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons,
when my sisters were there and knew that I was
nothing of the kind ? But I had no argument I could
use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing
unkind, so far as I can remember, but in a week or two
I was my old procrastinating idle self and had soon

83

left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on
and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris,
and the hangings round Morris's big bed at Kelmscott
House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about lying hap-
pily in bed when " all birds sing in the town of the
tree," were from her needle, though not from her
design. She worked for the first few months at
Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagina-
tion I cannot always separate what I saw and heard
from her report, or indeed from the report of that
tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some
worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for
other people. I doubt if their marriage or death made
him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known was so
well loved ; you saw him producing everywhere organ-
isation and beauty, seeming, almost in the same in-
stant, helpless and triumphant; and people loved him
as children are loved. People much in his neighbour-
hood became gradually occupied with him or about his
affairs, and, without any wish on his part, as simple
people become occupied with children. I remember a
man who was proud and pleased because he had dis-
tracted Morris's thoughts from an attack of gout by
leading the conversation delicately to the hated name
of Milton. He began at Swinburne : " O, Swin-
burne," said Morris, " is a rhetorician; my masters
have been Keats and Chaucer, for they make
pictures." " Does not Milton make pictures ? " asked
my informant. " No," was the answer, " Dante
makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great
earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician."
" Great earnest mind " sounded strange to me, and
I doubt not that were his questioner not a simple man
Morris had been more violent. Another day the same
man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was
c

H

worse, and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the
English language with foreign words.

He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember
little of his speech, which many thought the best of
all good talk, except that it matched his burly body
and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in
fact and expression. He alone of all the men I have
known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and
never ate strange meat. " Balzac ! Balzac ! " he said
to me once, " oh, that was the man the French Bour-
geoisie read so much a few years ago." I can re-
member him at supper praising wine : " Why do
people say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has
it not been made by the sunlight and the sap? " and
his dispraising houses decorated by himself : " Do you
suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a
house like a big barn, where one ate in one corner,
cooked in another corner, slept in the third corner, and
in the fourth received one's friends " ; and his com-
plaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground rail-
way : " If you must have a railway the best thing you
can do with it is to put it in a tube with a cork at
each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what
led up to his movement, he replied : " Oh, Ruskin and
Carlyle, but somebody should have been beside Carlyle
and punched his head every five minutes." Though I
remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued
going there on Sunday evenings, I should have caught
fire from his words and turned my hand to some
mediaeval work or other.

Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my
Wanderings of Usheen to his daughter, hoping of
course that it might meet his eyes, and soon after
sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn —
" You write my sort of poetry," he said and began to

85

praise me and to promise to send his praise to The
Commonwealth, the League organ, and he would have
said more had he not caught sight of a new orna-
mental cast-iron lamp post and got very heated upon
that subject.

I did not read economics, having turned socialist
because of Morris's lectures and pamphlets, and I
think it unlikely that Morris himself could read econo-
mics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane
to the matter. If the men and women imagined
by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had,
in let us say " News from Nowhere," then running
through The Commonwealth, described such men and
women, living under their natural conditions, or as
they would desire to live, then those conditions them-
selves must be the norm and could we but get rid of
certain institutions the world would turn from eccen-
tricity. Perhaps Morris himself justified himself in
his own heart by as simple an argument, and was, *s

the socialist D said to me one night, walking

home after some lecture, "an anarchist without know-
ing it." Certainly I and all about me, including

D himself, were for chopping up the old king for

Medea's pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to
do with the parliamentary socialists, represented for
men in general by the Fabian Society and Hyndman's
Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular

by D . During the period of transition mistakes

must be made, and the discredit of these mistakes
must be left to " the Bourgeoisie " ; and besides,
when you begin to talk of this measure, or that other,
you lose sight of the goal, and see, to reverse Swin-
burne's description of Tiresias, "Light on the way
but darkness on the goal." By mistakes Morris
meant vexatious restrictions and compromises — " If

any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on my
back and kick." That phrase very much expresses
our idea of revolutionary tactics : we all intended to
lie upon our back and kick. D , pale and seden-
tary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated
him with the left side of our heads, while admiring
him immensely with the right side. He alone was in-
vited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many tales of
his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle
who had tried to commit suicide by shutting his head
into a carpet-bag. At that time he was an obscure
man, known only for a witty speaker at street corners
and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an
assumed truculence and fury, cold logic, an invariable
gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet could never
close a speech without being denounced by a journey-
man hatter, with an Italian name. Converted to

socialism by D , and to anarchism by himself, with

swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and
perhaps, exaggerated our scruple about Parliament.

" I lack," said D , "the bump of reverence";

whereon the wild man shouted : " You 'ave a 'ole."
There are moments when looking back I somewhat
confuse my own figure with that of the hatter, image
of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the
violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even

remember sitting behind D and saying some rude

thing or other over his shoulder.

I don't remember why I gave it up but I did quite
suddenly and the push may have come from a young
workman who was educating himself between Morris
and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the
Navy, and when I had spoken of the battleships of
Nelson's day had said, " O, that was the decadence
of the battleship," but if his naval interests were

87

mediaeval, his ideas about religion were pure Karl
Marx, and we were soon in perpetual argument. Then
gradually the attitude towards religion of almost
everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject alto-
gether, got upon my nerves, for I broke out after
some lecture or other with all the arrogance of raging
youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such
words, and yet there must be a change of heart and
only religion could make it. What was the use of
talking about some new revolution putting all things
right, when the change must come, if come it did, with
astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun, or
it may have been like the drying of the moon ? Morris
rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen,
and he had to ring it a second time before I sat down.
He said that night at supper, " Of course I know
there must be a change of heart, but it will not come
as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you
were not being understood." He did not show any
vexation, but I never returned after that night; and
yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only
gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some
near sudden change for the better.

XIV

I SPENT my days at the British Museum and must, I
think, have been delicate, for I remember often put-
ting off hour after hour consulting some necessary
book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes
of the catalogue ; and yet to save money for my after-
noon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way
home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a

series of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-
stories and, for an American publisher, a two-
volume selection from the Irish novelists that would
be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each
book cost me more than three months' reading; and
I was paid for the first some twelve pounds (" O, Mr.
E.," said publisher to editor, " you must never
again pay so much ! ") and for the second twenty,
but I did not think myself badly paid, for I had
chosen the work for my own purposes.

Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was com-
pelled to live out of Ireland the greater part of every
year, and was but keeping my mind upon what I
knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I
believed that if Morris had set his stories amid the
scenery of his own Wales, for I knew him to be of
Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had
spent his childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed
his Prometheus, or some equal symbol, upon some
Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more
intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our
thought and had given perhaps to modern poetry a
breadth and stability like that of ancient poetry.
The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the
British Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine
figures, all unlike the Grecian athletes and Egyptian
kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the
middle of the crowd's applause, or sit above measur-
ing it out unpersuadable justice, became to me, now
or later, images of an unpremeditated joyous energy,
that neither I nor any other man, racked by doubt
and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once
achieved, might seem to men and women of Conne-
mara or of Gal way their very soul. In our study of
that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover,

and finished by the unpaid labour of great sculptors,
after her death from grief, or so runs the tale, we
cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and
Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art
where the artist's handiwork would hide as under
those half anonymous chisels, or as we find it in some
old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth
century Arthurian Romance. That handiwork
assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his
own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took
great pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's
life, one finds in old romances and ballads, and
thought his presence there all the more poignant
because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer,
behind his own maunciple and pardoner upon the
Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach, sing-
ing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of
a famished city to remember that in his own house at
home the very mice lacked food, and what old ballad
singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in
the very battle he sang by night? So masterful in-
deed was that instinct that when the minstrel knew
not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man :
" When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of
singers, answer with one voice : ' a blind man ; he
dwells upon rocky Chios ; his songs shall be the most
beautiful for ever.' ' Elaborate modern psychology
sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks in the
first person, but not those simple emotions which re-
semble the more, the more powerful they are, every-
body's emotion, and I was soon to write many poems
where an always personal emotion was woven into a
general pattern of myth and symbol. When the
Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and
callous — " For thy hapless fate, dear Ireland, and

40

sorrows of my own " — he but follows tradition and if
he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no
sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, with-
out compelling him to sedentary toil and so driving him
out from his fellows. I thought to create that sen-
suous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but
that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a
mediaeval Japanese painter left his style as an inherit-
ance to his family, and was careful to use a traditional
manner and matter, yet did something altogether
different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share
in Cain's curse, by all that sterile modern complica-
tion, by my " originality," as the newspapers call it.
Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons
of his Well at the World's End or his Waters
of the Wondrous Isles, always, to my mind, in the
likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk his
native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might
find imaginary inhabitants, half-planned a new method
and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely
towards that doctrine of " the mask " which has con-
vinced me that every passionate man (I have nothing
to do with mechanist, or philanthropist, or man whose
eyes have no preference) is, as it were, linked with
another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he
finds images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was
never of his own time, as the naturalistic writers and
painters bid all men be, but had some Roman em-
peror's image in his head and some condottiere blood
in his heart ; and when he crowned that head at Rome
with his own hands he had covered, as may be seen
from David's painting, his hesitation with that
emperor's old suit.

41

XV

I HAD various women friends on whom I would call
towards five o'clock mainly to discuss my thoughts
that I could not bring to a man without meeting some
competing thought, but partly because their tea and
toast saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but
with women, apart from their intimate exchanges of
thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a
seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons
when a couple of girls sat near and began enticing my
pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another,
and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant,
and presently went into the Museum without turning
my head towards them. Since then I have often won-
dered if they were pretty or merely very young. Some-
times I told myself very adventurous love-stories
with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out
a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the
ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated
by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed
in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau
on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when
walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a
little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-
window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and
began to remember lake water. From the sudden
remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first
lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.
I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from
rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that
rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and
occasionally that I must for my special purpose use
nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years

42

later I would not have written that first line with its
conventional archaism — " Arise and go " — nor the in-
version in the last stanza. Passing another day by the
new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it
was Gothic — " It is not very good," Morris had said,
" but it is better than anything else they have got
and so they hate it " — I grew suddenly oppressed by
the great weight of stone, and thought, " There are
miles and miles of stone and brick all round me," and
presently added, " If John the Baptist or his like were
to come again and had his mind set upon it, he could
make all these people go out into some wilderness
leaving their buildings empty," and that thought,
which does not seem very valuable now, so enlightened
the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a
few days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century
translation of Poggio's Liber Facetiarum or the
Hypneroto-macliia of Poliphili for a publisher ; I for-
get which, for I copied both ; and returned very pale
to my troubled family. I had lived upon bread and
tea because I thought that if antiquity found locust
and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough
to need no better. I was always planning some great
gesture, putting the whole world into one scale of the
balance and my soul into the other and imagining that
the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More
than thirty years have passed and I have seen no for-
cible young man of letters brave the metropolis, with-
out some like stimulant ; and all after two or three, or
twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have
understood that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little
sedentary stitches as though we were making lace. I
had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant : I
could ink my socks, that they might not show through
my shoes, with a most haughty mind, imagining my-

48

self, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in some far
place " under the canopy . . . i' the city of kites and
crows."

In London I saw nothing good and constantly re-
membered that Ruskin had said to some friend of my
father's — " As I go to my work at the British Museum
I see the faces of the people become daily more
corrupt." I convinced myself for a time, that on the
same journey I saw but what he saw. Certain old
women's faces filled me with horror, faces that are no
longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed :
the fat blotched faces, rising above double chins, of
women who have drunk too much beer and eaten much
meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking
with erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to them-
selves with loud voices, mad with drink and poverty,
but they were different, they belonged to romance.
Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so
carried their bodies.

XVI

I ATTEMPTED to restore one old friend of my
father's to the practice of his youth, but failed, though
he, unlike my father, had not changed his belief . My
father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at
Wigmore Street, once inventor of imaginative designs
and now a painter of melodramatic lions. At dinner
I had talked a great deal — too much, I imagine, for so
young a man, or maybe for any man — and on the way
home my father, who had been plainly anxious that I
should make a good impression, was very angry. He
said I had talked for effect and that talking for effect
was precisely what one must never do ; he had always

44

hated rhetoric and emphasis and had made me hate it ;
and his anger plunged me into great dejection. I
called at Nettleship's studio the next day to apologise,
and Nettleship opened the door himself and received
me with enthusiasm. He had explained to some
woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an
Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I
was not flattered, though relieved at not having to
apologise, for I soon discovered that what he really
admired was my volubility, for he himself was very
silent. He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a
grey beard, and a nose, as one of my father's friends
used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa all
the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup
that must have been designed for him alone, not
caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before he had
been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke
his arm, and because it had been badly set suffered
great pain for a long time. A little whisky would
always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great
deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having
signed his liberty away for certain months he was
completely cured. He had acquired, however, the
need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I
brought him an admiration settled in early boyhood,
for my father had always said, " George Wilson was
our born painter, but Nettleship our genius," and
even had he shown me nothing I could care for, I had
admired him still because my admiration was in my
bones. He showed me his early designs, and they,
though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Some-
thing of Blake they certainly did show, but had in
place of Blake's joyous, intellectual energy a
Saturnian passion and melancholy. " God Creating
Evil," the death-like head with a woman and a tiger

45

coming from the forehead, which Rossetti — or was it
Browning ? — had described " as the most sublime
design of ancient or modern art," had been lost, but
there was another version of the same thought, and
other designs never published or exhibited. They
rise before me even now in meditation, especially a
blind Titan-like ghost floating with groping hands
above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and
arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art
magazine, but after it was written and accepted the
proprietor, lifting what I considered an obsequious
caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-
Lepage rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship
did not mind its rejection, saying, " Who cares for
such things now? Not ten people," but he did
mind my refusal to show him what I had written.
Though what I had written was all eulogy, I dreaded
his judgment for it was my first art criticism. I
hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art
too much concerned with the sense of touch, with the
softness or roughness, the minutely observed irregu-
larity of surfaces, for his genius ; and I think he knew
it. " Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers,"
he said, " but they are all — all " — and he waved his
arm to the canvasses — " symbols." When I wanted
him to design gods, and angels, and lost spirits once
more, he always came back to the point " Nobody
would be pleased." " Everybody should have a

raison d'etre" was one of his phrases. "Mrs 's

articles are not good but they are her raison d'etre."
I had but little knowledge of art for there was little
scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated
the quality of anything that could be connected with
my general beliefs about the world. If I had been
able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions

I might have liked them also and I think that
Nettleship himself would have liked them better and
liking them better have become a better painter. We
had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give
a crude philosophical expression to mine while he
could only express his in action or with brush and
pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic
ambitions, very much like my own, for he had kept
all the moral ambition of youth, as for instance —
" Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a police-
man— was walking round Regent's Park barefooted
to keep the flesh under — good sort of thing to do. I
was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I
was a burglar and even when I explained and gave
him half a crown, he would not let me go till I had
promised to put on my boots before I met the next
policeman."

He was very proud and shy and I could not imagine
anybody asking him questions and so I was content to
take these stories as they came : confirmations of what
I had heard of him in boyhood. One story in
particular had stirred my imagination for, ashamed all
my boyhood of my lack of physical courage, I admired
what was beyond my imitation. He thought that any
weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character
of sin and while at breakfast with his brother, with
whom he shared a room on the third floor of a corner
house, he said that his nerves were out of order.
Presently he left the table, and got out through the
window and on to a stone ledge that ran along the
wall under the windowsills. He sidled along the
ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a
different window and returned to the table. " My
nerves," he said, " are better than I thought."

Nettleship said to me : " Has Edwin Ellis ever said

47

anything about the effect of drink upon my genius?*'
"No," I answered. "I ask," he said, "because
I have always thought that Ellis has some strange
medical insight." Though I had answered no, Ellis
had only a few days before used these words :
" Nettleship drank his genius away." Ellis, but
lately returned from Perugia where he had lived many
years, was another old friend of my father's but some
years younger than Nettleship or my father. Nettle-
ship had found his simplifying image, but in his
painting had turned away from it, while Ellis, the
son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man of science,
who was perhaps the last man in England to run the
circle of the sciences without superficiality, had never
found that image at all. He was a painter and poet,
but his painting, which did not interest me, showed no
influence but that of Leighton. He had started
perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite
influence, for no great Pre-Raphaelite picture was
painted after 1870, and left England too soon for that
of the French painters. He was, however, some-
times moving as a poet and still more often an
astonishment. I have known him cast something just
said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without
apparently ceasing to talk ; but the work once done he
could not or would not amend it, and my father
thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times
nobility of rhythm — an instinct for grandeur, and
after thirty years I still repeat to myself his address
to Mother Earth —

" O mother of the hills, forgive our towers,
O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams."

And there are certain whole poems that I read from
time to time or try to make others read. There is that
poem where the manner is unworthy of the matter,

48

being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve flee-
ing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so
carefully, and Eve replies that it is a little of the
apple-core kept for their children. There is that vision
concerning Christ the Less, a too hurriedly written bal-
lad, where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine
half " that fled to seek felicity " wanders wailing
through Golgotha, and there is The Saint and the
Youth, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved
complexities — " Seven silences like candles round her
face " is a line of his — and whether he wrote well or
ill had always a manner which I would have known
from that of any other poet. He would say to me,
"I am a mathematician with the mathematics left
out " — his father was a great mathematician — or " A
woman once said to me, ' Mr Ellis, why are your
poems like sums? ' " And certainly he loved symbols
and abstractions. He said once, when I had asked
hun not to mention something or other, " Surely you
have discovered by this time that I know of no means
whereby I can mention a fact in conversation."

He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-
Raphaelite studios, and early in our acquaintance put
into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had
written some years before an interpretation of the
poem that begins

" The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood,

Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood."

The four quarters of London represented Blake's
four great mythological personages, the Zoas, and
also the four elements. These few sentences were
the foundation of all study of the philosophy of
William Blake that requires an exact knowledge for

49

its pursuit and that traces the connection between his
system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I
recognised certain attributions, from what is some-
times called the Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis
had never heard, and with this proof that his inter-
pretation was more than fantasy he and I began our
four years' work upon the Prophetic Books of
William Blake. We took it as almost a sign of
Blake's personal help when we discovered that the
spring of 1889, when we first joined our know-
ledge, was one hundred years from the publication of
The Book of Thel, the first published of the
Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established
that the dead delight in anniversaries. After
months of discussion and reading we made a
concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there
was much copying to be done in the Museum and at
Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake's friend
and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had
many manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in
their religious ideas and doubtful of Blake's
orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour,
and I remember a timid old lady who had known
Blake when a child saying, " He had very wrong
ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus."
One old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to
sharpen our pencils but perhaps really to see that we
did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave us very
old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room
walls their present of Blake's Dante engravings.
Going thither and returning Ellis would entertain me
by philosophical discussion varied with improvised
stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have
picked up in Scotland, and, though I had read and
collected many folk tales, I did not see through the

50

deceit. I have a partial memory of two more
elaborate tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying
barefoot, from I forget what adventure through I
forget what Italian city, in the early morning.
Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped
past the sleepy porter at an hotel, calling out
" number so and so " as if he were some belated
guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door
he tried on the boots, and just as he got a pair to
fit, a voice cried from the room: " Who is that?"
" Merely me, sir," he called back, " taking your
boots." The other was of a martyr's Bible, round
which the cardinal virtues had taken personal form —
this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in the
possession of an old clergyman when a certain
jockey called upon him, and the cardinal virtues, con-
fused between jockey and clergyman, devoted them-
selves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a
cardinal virtue interfered and turned him back to
virtue, he lived in great credit, and made, but for
one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and
family knelt round in admiration and grief he
suddenly said "damn." "O my dear," said his
wife, " what a dreadful expression." He answered,
" I am going to heaven," and straightway died.
It was a long tale, for there were all the jockey's vain
attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the
clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it
ended happily for when the jockey died the cardinal
virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he would
talk to any audience that offered, one audience being
the same as another in his eyes, and it may have
been for this reason that my father called him un-
ambitious. When he was a young man he had
befriended a reformed thief and had asked the grate-

51

ful thief to take him round the thieves' quarters of
London. The thief, however, hurried him away
from the worst saying, " Another minute and they
would have found you out. If they were not the
stupidest of men in London, they had done so
already." Ellis had gone through a detailed,
romantic and witty account of all the houses he had
robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short
life.

His conversation would often pass out of my com-
prehension, or indeed I think of any man's, into a
labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then
suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of
wit. The mind is known to attain in certain condi-
tions of trance a quickness so extraordinary that we
are compelled at times to imagine a condition of
unendurable intellectual intensity from which we are
saved by the merciful stupidity of the body, and I
think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly
upon the edge of trance. Once we were discussing
the symbolism of sex in the philospohy of Blake and
had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I began
talking with a new sense of conviction and after a
moment Ellis, who was at his easel, threw down his
brush and said that he had just seen the same
explanation in a series of symbolic visions. " In
another moment," he said, " I should have been off."
We went into the open air and walked up and down
to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in
again and I began again my explanation, Ellis lying
upon the sofa. I had been talking some time when
Mrs Ellis came into the room and said, " Why are
you sitting in the dark?" Ellis answered, " But we
are not," and then added in a voice of wonder, " I
thought the lamp was lit, and that I was sitting up,

52

and now I find that I am lying down and that we
are in darkness." I had seen a flicker of light over
the ceiling but thought it a reflection from some
light outside the house, which may have been the
case.

XVII

I HAD already met most of the poets of my genera-
tion. I had said, soon after the publication of The
Wanderings of U sheen, to the editor of a series of
shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the
Irish fairies, " I am growing jealous of other poets
and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we
know each other and so feel a share in each other's
triumph." He was a Welshman, lately a mining
engineer, Ernest Rhys, a writer of Welsh transla-
tions and original poems, that have often moved me
greatly though I can think of no one else who has
read them. He was perhaps a dozen years older than
myself and through his work as editor knew every-
body who would compile a book for seven or eight
pounds. Between us we founded The Rhymers'
Club, which for some years was to meet every night
in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient
eating house in the Strand called The Cheshire
Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Victor
Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le
Gallienne, T. W. Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin
Ellis, and John Todhunter came constantly for a
time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home, less
constantly, while William Watson joined but never
came and Francis Thompson came once but never
joined; and sometimes if we met in a private house,

53

which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It
had been useless to invite him to The Cheshire
Cheese for he hated Bohemia. " Olive Schreiner,"
he said once to me, " is staying in the East End
because that is the only place where people do not
wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that
I live in the West End because nothing in life
interests me but the mask."

We read our poems to one another and talked
criticism and drank a little wine. I sometimes say
when I speak of the club, " We had such and such
ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great
Victorians, we set before us such and such aims," as
though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this
because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas
and that whenever I began to talk of them a gloomy
silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who
wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to
say a few years later, " You do not talk like a poet,
you talk like a man of letters," and if all the
Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had
not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater
number would have said the same thing. I was full
of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all
the while to be full of images, because I had gone
to the art school instead of a university. Yet even
if I had gone to a university, and learned all the
classical foundations of English literature and
English culture, all that great erudition which once
accepted frees the mind from restlessness, I should
have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or
attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient
recognized precedent I must needs find out some
reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start
that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-

54

born, and when I could I hid them, as men hide a dis-
agreeable ancestry; and that there was no help for
it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was
of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under
a curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled
to spend the time, needed for the making of the nest,
in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig
and lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even
Symons, were provincial at their setting out, but
their provincialism was curable, mine incurable;
while the one conviction shared by all the younger
men, but principally by Johnson and Home, who
imposed their personalities upon us, was an opposi-
tion to all ideas, all generalizations that can be

explained and debated. E fresh from Paris

would sometimes say — " We are concerned with
nothing but impressions," but that itself was a
generalization and met but stony silence. Con-
versation constantly dwindled into " Do you like so
and so's last book?" " No, I prefer the book
before it," and I think that but for its Irish
members, who said whatever came into their heads,
the club would not have survived its first difficult
months. I saw — now ashamed that I saw " like a
man of letters," now exasperated at their indifference
to the fashion of their own river-bed — that Swinburne
in one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a
third, had filled their work with what I called
" impurities," curiosities about politics, about
science, about history, about religion ; and that we
must create once more the pure work.

Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous
like our conversation, though I indeed wore a brown
velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old inverness
cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and

55

preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose actions
were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. But
no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne,
who wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an Inver-
ness cape that was quite new and almost fashionable,
would have shown himself for the world in any
costume but " that of an English gentleman."
" One should be quite unnoticeable," Johnson ex-
plained to me. Those who conformed most carefully
to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed
furthest from it in their handwriting, which was small,
neat, and studied, one poet — which, I forget — having
founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert.
Dowson and Symons I was to know better in later
years when Symons became a very dear friend, and
I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish rough-
ness and exasperation, though I saw much of him,
but from the first I devoted myself to Lionel John-
son. He and Home and Image and one or two others,
shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte
Street, Fitzroy Square, typical figures of transition,
doing as an achievement of learning and of exquisite
taste what their predecessors did in careless abun-
dance. All were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one
might meet in the rooms of one or other a ragged
figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon
the Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of
Rossetti and of Swinburne, but fresh now from some
low public house. Condemned to a long term of
imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into
drunkenness and misery. Introduced one night, how-
ever, to some man who mistook him, in the dim
candle light, for another Solomon, a successful
academic painter and R.A., he started to his feet in
a rage with, " Sir, do you dare to mistake me for

56

that mountebank ? " Though not one had hearkened to
the feeblest caw, or been spattered by the smallest
dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by sus-
pecting them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding,
and I owe it to that suspicion that I never became
intimate with Home, who lived to become the
greatest English authority upon Italian life in the
fourteenth century and to write the one standard
work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he
had designed a little church in the manner of Inigo
Jones for a burial ground near the Marble Arch.
Though I now think his little church a masterpiece,
its style was more than a century too late to hit my
fancy, at two or three and twenty ; and I accused him
of leaning towards that eighteenth century

"That taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied."

Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two
men, who are now my friends and in certain matters
my chief instructors. Somebody, probably Lionel
Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Bicketts
and Charles Shannon, certainly heirs of the great
generation, and the first thing I saw was a Shannon
picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and
satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full
of some more mythological mother and child and I
would have none of it and I told Shannon that he had
not painted a mother and child, but elegant people ex-
pecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach.
Somebody writing in The Germ had said that a picture
of a pheasant and an apple was merely a picture of
something to eat and I was so angry with the

57

indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of
all art criticism since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at
times see nothing else but subject. I thought that,
though it might not matter to the man himself
whether he loved a white woman or a black, a female
pickpocket or a regular communicant of the Church
of England, if only he loved strongly, it certainly
did matter to his relations and even under some
circumstances to his whole neighbourhood. Some-
times indeed, like some father in Moliere, I ignored
the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to
admit that a trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of
colour, may lend piquancy, especially if the connection
be not permanent.

Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest
talents were to live such passionate lives and die such
tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. Rolleston,
seemed always out of place; it was I brought him
there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland
later on. I have known young Dublin working men
slip out of their workshop to see the second Thomas
Davis passing by, and even remember a conspiracy,
by some three or four, to make him " the leader of
the Irish race at home and abroad," and all because
he had regular features; and when all is said
Alexander the Great and Alcibiades were personable
men, and the Founder of the Christian religion was
the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a
little too short, but exactly six feet high. We in
Ireland thought as do the plays and ballads, not
understanding that, from the first moment wherein
nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has
only granted great creative power to men whose faces
are contorted with extravagance or curiosity, or
dulled with some protecting stupidity.

58

I had now met all those who were to make the
'nineties of the last century tragic in the history of
literature, but as yet we were all seemingly equal,
whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even
personalties to one another. I remember saying one
night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more poets than
usual had come, " None of us can say who will suc-
ceed, or even who has or has not talent. The only
thing certain about us is that we are too many."

XVIII

I HAVE described what image — always opposite to the
natural self or the natural world — Wilde, Henley,
Morris, copied or tried to copy, but I have not said if I
found an image for myself. I know very little about
myself and much less of that anti-self : probably the
woman who cooks my dinner or the woman who sweeps
out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because
nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and
thither looking for conversation, and ready to deny
from fear or favour his dearest conviction, that I
love proud and lonely things. When I was a child
and went daily to the sexton's daughter for writing
lessons, I found one poem in her School Reader that
delighted me beyond all others : a fragment of some
metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the
birds sing scorn upon mankind. In later years my
mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley's dream of a
young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying
philosophy in some lonely tower, or of his old man,
master of all human knowledge, hidden from human
sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediter-

ranean shore. One passage above all ran perpetually
in my ears —

" Some feign that he is Enoch : others dream

He was pre-Adamite, and has survived

Cycles of generation and of ruin.

The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,

And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,

Deep contemplation and unwearied study,

In years outstretched beyond the date of man,

May have attained to sovereignty and science

Over those strong and secret things and thoughts

Which others fear and know not.

Mahmud. I would talk

With this old Jew.

Hassan. Thy will is even now

Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God ! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset where the stream
Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
Ajid evening airs wander upon the wave;
And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
* Ahasuerus ! ' and the caverns round
Will answer ' Ahasuerus ! ' If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
Lighting him over Marmora ; and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus :
Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference,
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion."

Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the
Theosophists because they had affirmed the real
existence of the Jew, or of his like, and, apart from

whatever might have been imagined by Huxley,
Tyndall, Carolus Duran, and Bastien-Lepage, I saw
nothing against his reality. Presently having heard
that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or
from India, I thought it time to look the matter up.
Certainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the world
it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no
duty to us, communing with God only, conceding
nothing from fear or favour. Have not all peoples,
while bound together in a single mind and taste,
believed that such men existed and paid them that
honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they
have refused to philanthropists and to men of
learning.

XIX

I FOUND Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Nor-
wood, with but, as she said, three followers left —
the Society of Psychical Research had just reported
on her Indian phenomena — and as one of the three
followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable
visitors, I was kept a long tune kicking my heels.
Presently I was admitted and found an old woman
in a plain loose dark dress : a sort of old Irish peasant
woman with an air of humour and audacious power. I
was still kept waiting, for she was deep in conversation
with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding
doors into the next room and stood, in sheer idleness
of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly
stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon the
ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came
out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame
Blavatsky to say, " Your clock has hooted me."

61

" It of tens hoots at a stranger," she replied. " Is
there a spirit in it?" I said. " I do not know," she
said, " I should have to be alone to know what is
in it." I went back to the clock and began examin-
ing it and heard her say : " Do not break my clock."
I wondered if there was some hidden mechanism and
I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found
any, though Henley had said to me, " Of course she
gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genius
has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her
coffin." Presently the visitor went away and
Madame Blavatsky explained that she was a propa-
gandist for women's rights who had called to find out
" why men were so bad." " What explanation did
you give her?" I said. " That men were born bad,
but women made themselves so," and then she
explained that I had been kept waiting because she
had mistaken me for some man, whose name resembled
mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness
of the earth.

When I next saw her she had moved into a house
at Holland Park, and some time must have passed —
probably I had been in Sligo where I returned con-
stantly for long visits — for she was surrounded by
followers. She sat nightly before a little table
covered with green baize and on this green baize she
scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She
would scribble symbols, sometimes humorously
explained, and sometimes unintelligible figures, but the
chalk was intended to mark down her score when she
played patience. One saw in the next room a large
table where every night her followers and guests,
often a great number, sat down to their vegetable
meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the
folding doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of

female Dr Johnson, impressive I think to every man
or woman who had themselves any richness, she
seemed impatient of the formalism of the shrill
abstract idealism of those about her, and this
impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames :
" O you are a flap-doodle, but then you are a
theosophist and a brother." The most devout and
learned of all her followers said to me, " H.P.B. has
just told me that there is another globe stuck on to
this at the north pole, so that the earth has really
a shape something like a dumb-bell." I said, for I
knew that her imagination contained all the folklore
of the world, " That must be some piece of Eastern
mythology." " O no it is not," he said, " of that I
am certain, and there must be something in it or she
would not have said it." Her mockery was not kept
for her followers alone, and her voice would become
harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour,
when she spoke of what seemed to her scientific
materialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided by
some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of
brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin
woman to see her and this woman had a brother, a
physiologist whose reputation, though known to
specialists alone, was European, and because of this
brother a family pride in everything scientific and
modern. The Dublin woman scarcely opened her
mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly
unknown to Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in
that wrinkled old face bent over the cards, and the
only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, the
dislike of one woman for another. Madame
Blavatsky seemed to bundle herself up, becoming all
primeval peasant, and began complaining of her
ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late

her master — her " old Jew," her " Ahasuerus " —
cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. " I was
sitting here in my chair," said she, " when the
master came in and brought something with him which
he put over my knee, something warm which enclosed
my knee — it was a live dog which he had cut open." I
recognized a cure used sometimes in mediaeval
medicine. She had two masters and their portraits,
ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent
artist, stood upon either side of the folding doors.
One night when talk was impersonal and general, I
sat gazing through the folding doors into the dimly
lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red
light shining upon a picture and got up to see where
the red light came from. It was the picture of an
Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When
I returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said,
" What did you see ?" " A picture," I said. " Tell
it to go away." " It is already gone." " So much
the better," she said, " I was afraid it was medium-
ship. But it is only clairvoyance." " What is the
difference?" "If it had been mediumship, it would
have stayed in spite of you. Beware of mediumship ;
it is a kind of madness; I know for I have been
through it."

I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike
the occasional joking of those about her, was illogical
and incalculable and yet always kindly and tolerant.
I had called one evening to find her absent but
expected every moment. She had been somewhere at
the seaside for her health and arrived with a little
suite of followers. She sat down at once in her big
chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel
while all looked on full of curiosity. It contained a
large family Bible. " This is a present for my maid,"

64

she said. " What a Bible and not even annotated !"
said some shocked voice. " Well, my children," was
the answer, " what is the good of giving lemons to
those who want oranges?" When I first began to
frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I
noticed a handsome clever woman of the world there,
who seemed certainly very much out of place, penitent
though she thought herself. Presently there was
much scandal and gossip for the penitent was plainly
entangled with two young men, who were expected
to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so great
that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before
her and to speak after this fashion, " We think that it
is necessary to crush the animal nature ; you should live
in chastity in act and thought. Initiation is granted
only to those who are entirely chaste," and so it
ran on for some time. However, after some minutes
in that vehement style, the penitent standing crushed
and shamed before her, she had wound up, "I can-
not permit you more than one." She was quite
sincere but thought that nothing mattered but what
happened in the mind, and that if we could not master
the mind our actions were of little importance. One
young man filled her with exasperation for she
thought that his settled gloom came from his chastity.
I had known him in Dublin where he had been
accustomed to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in
which he would eat vegetables and drink water, with
brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil.
After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle
the imagination of the members of the local
theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about
harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of
melancholy. A fellow-theosophist once found him
hanging from the windowpole, but cut him down in

65

the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him
down, " What did you say to each other?" He said,
" We spent the night telling comic stories and
laughing a great deal." This man, torn between
sensuality and visionary ambition, was now the most
devout of all, and told me that in the middle of the
night he could often hear the ringing of the little
66 astral bell " whereby Madame Blavatsky's master
called her attention, and that, although it was a
silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake.
Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show
in those who had right of entrance, on some night
when the discussion was private, and as I passed he
whispered into my ear, " Madame Blavatsky is
perhaps not a real woman at all. They say that her
dead body was found many years ago upon some
Russian battlefield." She had two dominant moods,
both of extreme activity, one calm and philosophic,
and this was the mood always on that night in the
week when she answered questions upon her system,
and as I look back after thirty years I often ask my-
self, "Was her speech automatic? Was she a trance
medium, or in some similar state, one night in every
week?" In the other mood she was full of fantasy
and inconsequent raillery. " That is the Greek
Church, a triangle like all true religion," I recall her
saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green
baize, and then as she made it disappear in meaning-
less scribbles, " it spread out and became a bramble
bush like the Church of Rome." Then rubbing it
all out except one straight line, " Now they have
lopped off the branches and turned it into a broom-
stick and that is protestantism." And so it was
night after night always varied and unforeseen. I
have observed a like sudden extreme change in others,
E

half whose thought was supernatural and Lawrence
Oliphant records somewhere or other like observa-
tions. I can remember only once finding her in a
mood of reverie, something had happened to damp
her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon
herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but
once, of Alfred de Musset, whom she had known well
enough to dislike for his morbidity, and George
Sand, whom she had known so well that they had
dabbled in magic together of which " neither knew
anything at all " in those days ; and she ran on, as if
there was nobody there to overhear her, " I used to
wonder at and pity the people who sell their souls to
the devil, but now I only pity them. They do it to
have somebody on their side," and added to that, after
some words I have forgotten, " I write, write, write
as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks."

Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn
every doctrine into a new sanction for the puritanical
convictions of their Victorian childhood, cranks came
from half Europe and from all America, and they
came that they might talk. One American said to
me, " She has become the most famous woman in
the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us
to talk." They talked and she played patience, and
totted up her score on the green baize, and generally
seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no
more. There was a woman who talked perpetually
of " the divine spark " within her, until Madame
Blavatsky stopped her with — " Yes, my dear, you
have a divine spark within you and if you are not very
careful you will hear it snore." A certain Salvation
Army captain probably pleased her, for if vociferous
and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had
known hardship and spoke of his visions while starv-

67

ing in the streets and he was still perhaps a little
light in the head. I wondered what he could preach
to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism,
till I met a man who had heard him talking near
Covent Garden to some crowd in the street. " My
friends," he was saying, " you have the kingdom of
heaven within you and it would take a pretty big
pill to get that out."

Meanwhile I had got no nearer to proving that
the sage Ahasuerus " dwells in a sea cavern 'mid
the Demonesi," nor did I learn any more of those
" Masters " whose representative Madame Blavatsky
claimed to be. All there seemed to feel their
presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more
important than any visible inhabitant of the house.
When Madame Blavatsky was more silent, less vivid
than usual, it was " because her Masters were angry ;"
they had rebuked her because of some error, and she
professed constant error. Once I seemed in their
presence, or that of some messenger of theirs. It was
about nine at night, and half a dozen of us sat round
her big table cloth, when the room seemed to fill with
the odour of incense. Somebody came from upstairs,
but could smell nothing — had been outside the
influence it seems — but to myself and the others, it
was very strong. Madame Blavatsky said it was a
common Indian incense, and that some pupil of her
master's was present; she seemed anxious to make
light of the matter and turned the conversation to
something else. Certainly it was a romantic house,
and I did not separate myself from it by my own will.
I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction, and,
affected by the abstraction of what were called
" esoteric teachings," I began a series of experiments.
Some book or magazine published by the society had

68

quoted from that essay of magic, which Sibley, the
eighteenth century astrologer, had bound up with his
big book upon astrology. If you burnt a flower to
ashes and put the ashes under, I think, the receiver
of an air pump, and stood the receiver in the moon-
light for so many nights, the ghost of the flower
would appear hovering over its ashes. I got together
a committee which performed this experiment without
results. The " esoteric teachings " had declared that
a certain very pure kind of indigo was the symbol
of one of the seven principles into which they divided
human nature. I got with some difficulty a little
of this pure indigo, and gave portions of it to
members of the committee, and asked them to put it
under their pillows at night and record their dreams.
I argued that all natural scenery must be divided
into seven types according to these principles, and
by their study we could rid the mind of abstraction.
Presently a secretary, a friendly, intelligent man,
asked me to come and see him, and, when I did,
complained that I was causing discussion and distur-
bance. A certain fanatical hungry face had been
noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that
I was not in agreement with their methods or their
philosophy. " We have certain definite ideas," he
said, " and we have but one duty, to spread them
through the world. I know that all these people
become dogmatic, that they believe what they can
never prove, that their withdrawal from family life
is for them a great misfortune, but what are we to
do? We have been told that all spiritual influx
into the society will come to an end in 1897 for
exactly one hundred years; before that date our
fundamental ideas must be spread in all countries."
I knew the doctrine, and it made me wonder why

that old woman, or the " masters " from whom,
whatever they were or were not, her genius had come,
insisted upon it; for influx of some kind there must
always be. Did they dread heresy, or had they no
purpose but the greatest possible immediate effect?

XX

AT the British Museum reading room I often saw
a man of thirty-six, or thirty-seven, in a brown
velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an
athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name,
or knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance.
Presently I was introduced, where or by what man
or woman I do not remember. He was called Liddle
Mathers, but would soon, under the touch of " The
Celtic Movement," become Macgregor Mathers, and
then plain Macgregor. He was the author of The
Kabbala Unveiled, and his studies were two only —
magic and the theory of war, for he believed himself
a born commander and all but equal in wisdom and
in power to that old Jew. He had copied many
manuscripts on magic ceremonial and doctrine in the
British Museum, and was to copy many more in
Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly
that I began certain studies and experiences, that
were to convince me that images well up before the
mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or
subconscious memory. I believe that his mind in
those early days did not belie his face and body,
though in later years it became unhinged, for he
kept a proud head amid great poverty. One that
boxed with him nightly has told me that for many
weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was

70

the stronger man, and only knew long after that
during those weeks Mathers starved. With him I met
an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most
panic-stricken person I have ever known, though
Mathers' introduction had been " he unites us to the
great adepts of antiquity." This old man took me
aside that he might say — " I hope you never invoke
spirits — that is a very dangerous thing to do. I am
told that even the planetary spirits turn upon us in
the end." I said, "Have you ever seen an appari-
tion?" "O yes, once," he said. "I have my
alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house
where the Bishop cannot see it. One day I was
walking up and down there when I heard another
footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned
and saw a girl I had been in love with when I was a
young man, but she died long ago. She wanted me
to kiss her. O no, I would not do that." " Why
not?" I said. " O she might have got power over me."
"Has your alchemical research had any success?" I
said. " Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French
alchemist said it had the right smell and the right
colour " (the alchemist may have been Eliphas
Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would
have said anything) " but the first effect of the elixir
is that your nails fall out and your hair falls off. I
was afraid that I might have made a mistake and
that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a
shelf. I meant to drink it when I was an old man,
but when I got it down the other day it had all dried
up."

Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he
emerged into brief prosperity, becoming for two or
three years Curator of a private museum at Forest
Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the

71

sister of the philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house
at Forest Hill was soon a romantic place to a little
group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow
students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being in-
satiable , who first brought news of that house and that
she brought it in mockery and in wonder. Mathers had
taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had
said, " Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine my-
self a ram," and at once all the sheep ran after him;
another day he had tried to quell a thunder storm by
making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but
the storm had not been quelled; and then came the
crowning wonder. He had given her a piece of card-
board on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and
had told her to hold it to her forehead and she had
found herself walking upon a cliff above the sea, seagulls
shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram story
impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite
a cat by imagining a mouse in front of its nose,
but still some chance movement of the flock might
have deceived her. But what could have deceived her
in that final marvel? Then another brought a like
report, and presently my own turn came. He gave
me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight
came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as
if the darkness had been cut with a knife, for that
miracle is mostly a woman's privilege, but there rose
before me mental images that I could not control : a
desert and black Titan raising himself up by his two
hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins.
Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the
order of Salamanders because he had shown me their
symbol, but it was not necessary even to show the
symbol, it would have been sufficient thab he imagined
it. I had already written in my diary, under some

72

date in 1887, that Madame Blavatsky's Masters were
" trance personalities," and I must have meant such
beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more
powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a
table in the Royal Irish Academy a pamphlet on
Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so
remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple
wall, had slipped down after dark and trampled the
neighbours' fields of rice. Somebody had come into
the temple in the early morning, had been startled
by a shower of water drops, had looked up and seen
painted horses still wet from the dew-covered fields,
but now " trembling into stillness."

I had soon mastered Mathers' symbolic system, and
discovered that for a considerable minority — whom I
could select by certain unanalysable characteristics —
the visible world would completely vanish, and that
world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One
day when alone in a third-class carriage, in the very
middle of the railway bridge that crosses the Thames
near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to
Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit
Mathers had called up ? I had wondered when I smelt
it at Madame Blavatsky's — if there might be some con-
trivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was
no longer possible. I believed that Salamander of
his but an image, and presently I found analogies
between smell and image. It must be from thought
but what certainty had I, that what had taken me by
surprise, could be from my own thought, and if a
thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the
sense of touch ? Then I discovered among that group
of students that surrounded Macgregor, a man who
had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked to find his
breast covered with scratches. Was there an impass-

78

able barrier between those scratches and the trampled
fields of rice? It would seem so, and yet all was
uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments
leave to our imagination?

Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much
imagination and imperfect taste, but if he made
some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some
hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change
claim, statement or joke, as though he were a figure
in a play of our composition. He was a necessary
extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone
else, a claim implicit in the romantic movement from
the time of Shelley and of Goethe; and in body and
in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust have
looked at the end of his hundred years. In the
credulity of our youth we secretly wondered if he had
not met with, perhaps even been taught by some old
man who had found the elixir. Nor did he un-
deceive us. " If you find the elixir," he was
accustomed to say, " you always look a few years
younger than the age at which you found it. If
you find it at sixty you will look fifty for a hundred
years." None of us would have admitted that we
believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergy-
man excited no belief, yet one among us certainly
laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten years ago I
called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but
at his private house, and I remembered whose pupil
he had been when I found among the ashes of the
hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he
studied alchemy that he might some day write its
history, and I found when I questioned others, that
for twenty years there had been just such a little pot
among the ashes.

74

XXI

I GENERALIZED a great deal and was ashamed of
it. I thought it was my business in life to be an artist
and a poet, and that there could be no business com-
parable to that. I refused to read books and even to
meet people who excited me to generalization, all to
no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood^
though without the old regularity of hour and place,
and I began to pray that my imagination might some-
how be rescued from abstraction and became as pre-
occupied with life as had been the imagination of
Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered
continual remorse, and only became content when my
abstractions had composed themselves into picture
and dramatization. My very remorse helped to spoil
my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimen-
tality through my refusal to permit it any share of
an intellect which I considered impure. Even in
practical life I only very gradually began to use
generalizations, that have since become the founda-
tion of all I have done, or shall do, in Ireland. For
all I know all men may have been so timid, for I am
persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the
truths we shall ever find, but as yet we do not know
truths that belong to us from opinions, caught up in
casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life goes
on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in
defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or
others, and it is these thoughts, tested by passion,
that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in
all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their
own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily
recreation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and

75

so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called
" the Mask " is an emotional antithesis to all that
comes out of their internal nature. We begin to live
when we have conceived life as tragedy.

XXII

A CONVICTION that the world was now but a bundle
of fragments possessed me without ceasing. I had
tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby plung-
ing into greater silence an already too silent evening.
" Johnson," I was accustomed to say, " you are the
only man I know whose silence has beak and claw."
I had lectured on it to some London Irish society,
and I was to lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but
I never found but one interested man, an official of
the Primrose League, who was also an active
member of the Fenian Brotherhood. "I am an
extreme conservative apart from Ireland," I have
heard him explain ; and I have no doubt that personal
experience made him share the sight of any eye that
saw the world in fragments. I had been put into a
rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus
Duran, and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted
the unimportance of subject whether in art or
literature, but the independence of the arts from one
another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every
age where poet and artist confined themselves gladly
to some inherited subject matter known to the whole
people, for I thought that in man and race alike
there is something called "Unity of Being," using that
term as Dante used it when he compared beauty in the
Convito to a perfectly proportioned human body. My
father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred

76

a comparison to a musical instrument so strung that
if we touch a string all the strings murmur faintly.
There is not more desire, he had said, in lust than in
true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope,
affection, admiration, and, given appropriate circum-
stance, every emotion possible to man. When I
began, however, to apply this thought to the state
and to argue for a law-made balance among trades and
occupations my father displayed at once the violent
free trader and propagandist of liberty. I thought
that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning
by abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of
occupation, or class or faculty —

" Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild."

I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster,
being a part of abhorred London, did not interest me,
but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante, and
the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great
figures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of
Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I thought
that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular
lore its back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure
too from remembering that Homer was sung, and
from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing
some stanza from The Divine Comedy, and from Don
Quixote's meeting with some common man that sang
Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly
for any poet later than Chaucer and though I pre-
ferred Shakespeare to Chaucer I begrudged my own
preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and
heart, until both mind and heart began to break into

77

fragments a little before Shakespeare's birth ? Music
and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer robbed
verse of its speed that he might give it greater
meditation, though for another generation or so min-
strels were to sing his lengthy elaborated Troilus and
Criseyde; painting parted from religion in the later
Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility
undisturbed; while, that it might characterize, where
it had once personified, it renounced, in our own age,
all that inherited subject matter which we have named
poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character
itself among the abstractions, encouraged by
Congreve's saying that " passions are too powerful
in the fair sex to let humour," or as we say
character, " have its course." Nor have we fared
better under the common daylight, for pure reason
has notoriously made but light of practical reason,
and has been made light of in its turn from that
morning when Descartes discovered that he could
think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I
original thought to discover, being so late of the
school of Morris, that machinery had not separated
from handicraft wholly for the world's good, nor to-
notice that the distinction of classes had become their
isolation. If the London merchants of our day
competed together in writing lyrics they would notr
like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open street
before the house of the victor ; nor do the great ladies
of London finish their balls on the pavement before
their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in
the eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding
sympathy. Doubtless because fragments broke into
ever smaller fragments we saw one another in a light
of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one
technical element reigned and now another, generation

78

hated generation, and accomplished beauty was
snatched away when it had most engaged our
affections. One thing I did not foresee, not having
the courage of my own thought : the growing
inurderousness of the world.

" Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart ; the centre cannot hold ;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned ;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

XXIII

IF abstraction had reached, or all but reached its
climax, escape might be possible for many, and if it
had not, individual men might still escape. If
Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from
Chaucer's crowd, forgot their common goal and
shrine, and after sundry magnifications became each
in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had
^fter split into their elements and so given birth to
romantic poetry, must I reverse the cinematograph?
I thought that the general movement of literature
must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in
>casual, temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I
had lately read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and thought
that where his theoretical capacity had not awakened
there was such a turning back : but a nation
or an individual with great emotional intensity
might follow the pilgrims as it were to some unknown
shrine, and give to all those separated elements and
to all that abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical,

79

a mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's rough
tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a
procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought
back from Paris stories of Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
and so brought me confirmation, as I thought, and I
began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi's. I
could not endure, however, an international art,
picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might
I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create
some new Prometheus Unbound ; Patrick or Columbkil,
Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus' stead; and, instead of
Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben? Have not all
races had their first unity from a polytheism, that
marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland
imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes
knew and even sang, and might we not make those
stories current among the educated classes, re-
discovering for the work's sake what I have called
" the applied arts of literature," the association of
literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance;
and at last, it might be, so deepen the politcal passion
of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and
day-labourer would accept a common design?
Perhaps even these images, once created and
associated with river and mountain, might move of
themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent
life, like those painted horses that trampled the rice
fields of Japan.

XXIV

I USED to tell the few friends to whom I could speak
these secret thoughts that I would make the
attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization, its
elements multiplying By division like certain low

80

forms of life, was all-powerful; but in reality I had
the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that first con-
viction, to that first desire for unity, this other con-
viction, long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently
apprehended : Nations, races, and individual men are
unified by an image, or bundle of related images,
symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which
is of all states of mind not impossible, the most
difficult to that man, race, or nation; because only
the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated with-
out despair, rouses the will to full intensity.

A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized
sentimentality, may drive their people to war but
the day draws near when they cannot keep them
there ; and how shall they face the pure nations of the
East when the day comes to do it with but equal arms ?
I had seen Ireland in my own time turn from the
bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of
O'Connell's generation and school, and offer herself
to the solitary and proud Parnell as to her anti-self,
buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to
hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in
Europe to seek unity as deliberately as it had been
sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect, from
the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we
must seek it differently, no longer considering it con-
venient to epitomize all human knowledge, but find
it we well might could we first find philosophy and a
little passion.

BOOK II

IRELAND AFTER THE FALL
OF PARNELL

IRELAND AFTER THE FALL
OF PARNELL

A COUPLE of years before the death of Parnell, I
had wound up my introduction to those selections from
the Irish novelists with the prophecy of an intellectual
movement at the first lull in politics, and now I
wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that
way, for I preferred to think that the sudden emotion
that now came to me, the sudden certainty that Ire-
land was to be like soft wax for years to come, was
a moment of supernatural insight. How could I tell,
how can I tell even now?

There was a little Irish Society of young people,
clerks, shop boys, and shop girls, called " The
South wark Irish Literary Society," and it had ceased
to meet because the girls got the giggles when any
member of the Committee got up to speak. Every
member of it had said all he had to say many times
over. I had given them a lecture about the falling
asunder of the human mind, as an opening flower falls
asunder, and all had professed admiration because I
had made such a long speech without quotation or
narrative; and now I invited the Committee to my
father's house at Bedford Park, and there proposed
a new organization, " The Irish Literary Society.*'
T. W. Rolleston came to t that first meeting, and it
was because he had much tact, and a knowledge of

83

84

the technical business of committees, that a society
was founded which was joined by every London-Irish
author and journalist. In a few months somebody
had written its history, and published that history,
illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling. When it
was published I was in Dublin, founding a society
there called " The National Literary Society," and
affiliating it with certain Young Ireland Societies in
country towns which seemed anxious to accept its
leadership. I had definite plans; I wanted to create
an Irish Theatre; I was finishing my Countess
Cathleen in its first meagre version, and thought of
a travelling company to visit our country branches;
but before that there must be a popular imaginative
literature. I arranged with Mr. Fisher Unwin and
his reader, Mr Edward Garnett — a personal friend of
mine — that when our organization was complete Mr
Fisher Unwin was to publish for it a series of books
at a shilling each. I told only one man of this
arrangement, for after I had made my plans I heard
an alarming rumour. Old Sir Charles Gavan Duffy
was coming from Australia to start an Irish publish-
ing house, and publish a series of books, and I did
not expect to agree with him, but knew that I must
not seek a quarrel. The two societies were necessary
because their lectures must take the place of an
educated popular press, which we had not, and have
not now, and create a standard of criticism. Irish
literature had fallen into contempt; no educated man
ever bought an Irish book; in Dublin Professor
Dowden, the one man of letters with an international
influence, was accustomed to say that he knew an
Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen
some books whose binding had been fastened together
by rotten glue; and Standish O'Grady's last book

85

upon ancient Irish history — a book rather wild, rather
too speculative, but forestalling later research — had
not been reviewed by any periodical or newspaper in
England or in Ireland.

At first I had great success, for I brought with
me a list of names written down by some member of
the Southwark Irish Literary Society, and for six
weeks went hither and thither appealing and persuad-
ing. My first conversation was over a butter-tub in
some Dublin back street, and the man agreed with
me at once; everybody agreed with me; all felt that
something must be done, but nobody knew what.
Perhaps they did not understand me, perhaps I kept
back my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to
listen ; it was enough that I had a plan, and was
determined about it. When I went to lecture in a
provincial town, a workman's wife, who wrote
patriotic stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me
to her house, and I found all her children in their
Sunday best. She made a little speech, very formal
and very simple, in which she said that what she
wrote had no merit, but that it paid for her children's
schooling; and she finished her speech by telling her
children never to forget that they had seen me. One
man compared me to Thomas Davis, another said I
could organise like Davitt, and I thought to succeed
as they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine this
applause, nor the true thoughts of those I met, nor
the general condition of the country, but I examined
myself a great deal, and was puzzled at myself. I
knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often
leave some business undone, or purchase unmade,
because I shrank from facing a strange office or a
shop a little grander than usual, and yet, here was
I delightedly talking to strange people every day.

It was many years before I understood that I had
surrendered myself to the chief temptation of the
artist, creation without toil. Metrical composition
is always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon
the first day, not one rhyme is in its place ; and when
at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft
of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time
I had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line
stanza would take several days, and not seem finished
even then; and I had not learnt, as I have now, to
put it all out of my head before night, and so the last
night was generally sleepless, and the last day a day
of nervous strain. But now I had found the happiness
that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a fire
balloon.

II

AT first I asked no help from prominent persons,
and when some clerk or shop-assistant would say " Dr
So-and-so or Professor So-and-so will have nothing to
do with us " I would answer, " When we prove we
can gather sheep shepherds will come." Presently,
come they did, old, middle-aged, or but little older
than myself, but all with some authority in their
town : John O'Leary, John F. Taylor, and Douglas
Hyde, and Standish O'Grady, and of these much
presently ; Dr. Sigerson who has picked a quarrel with
me and of whom I shall say nothing that he may not
pick another; Count Plunkett, Sinn Feiner of late
and Minister of Bail Eireann ; Dr. Coffey, now head of
the National University; George Coffey, later on
Curator of the Irish Antiquities at the Museum of
the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall, poet
and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of

8?

corporation; Richard Ashe King, novelist and
correspondent of Truth, a gentle, intelligent
person, typical of nothing; and others, known or
unkown. We were now important, had our Com-
mittee room in the Mansion House, and I remember
that the old Mansion House butler recognised our
importance so fully, that he took us into his
confidence once in every week, while we sat waiting
for a quorum. He had seen many Lord Mayors, and
remembered those very superior Lord Mayors who
lived before the extension of the municipal franchise,
and spoke of his present masters with contempt.
Among our persons of authority, and among the
friends and followers they had brought, there were
many who at that time found it hard to refuse if any-
body offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a
round tower with a wolf-dog at its foot, and who
would have felt it inappropriate to publish an Irish
book, that had not harp and shamrock and green
cover, so completely did their minds move amid
Young Ireland images and metaphors, and I thought
with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy ;
while here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling
face that we discover for the first time in certain
pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry, mediaeval
speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El
Greco and in its place a self-complacent certainty that
all had been arranged, provided for, set out in clear
type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These,
however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for
Young Ireland had sought a nation unified by political
doctrine, a subservient art and letters aiding and
abetting. The movement of thought, which had in
the 'fifties and 'fourties. at Paris and London and
Boston, filled literature, and especially poetical

literature with curiosities about science, about history
about politics, with moral purpose and educational
fervour — abstractions all — had created a new instru-
ment for Irish politics, a method of writing that took
its poetical style from Campbell, Scott, Macauley, and
Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its
prose style — in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland
prose writer who had a style at all — from Carlyle.
To recommend this method of writing as literature
without much reservation and discrimination I con-
tended was to be deceived or to practice deception.
If one examined some country love-song, one dis-
covered that it was not written by a man in love, but
by a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed
possess, in the words of Daniel O'Connell, " the
finest peasantry upon earth." Yet one well-known
anthology was introduced by the assertion that such
love-poetry was superior to " affected and artificial "
English love-songs like " Drink to me only with thine
eyes " — " affected and artificial," the very words
used by English Victorians who wrote for the news-
papers to discourage capricious, personal writing.
However, the greater number even of those who
thought our famous anthology, The Spirit of the
Nation, except for three or four songs, but good
election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain en-
lightened believers look upon the story of Adam and
Eve and the apple, or that of Jonah and the whale,
which they do not question publicly, because such
stories are an integral part of religion to simple men
and women. I, upon the other hand, being in the
intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly as
possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from
Gaelic writers, or written out of a personal and
generally tragic experience.

89

in

THE greater number of those who joined my society
had come under the seal of Young Ireland at that
age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious
had gone daily to some public library to read the
bound volumes of Thomas Davis 's old newspaper, and
tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No philosophic
speculation, no economic question of the day, dis-
turbed an orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion
had no philosophic history, and the religious bigot
was glad that it should be so. Some few of the
younger men were impatient, and it was these
younger men, more numerous in the London than in
the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we
had been joined by a few older men — some personal
friends of my own or my father — who had only
historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school.
Young Ireland's prose had been as much occupied
with Irish virtue, and more with the invader's vices,
than its poetry, and we were soon mired and sunk
into such problems as to whether Cromwell was
altogether black, the heads of the old Irish clans
altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and church
burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes
keep to this day the maps of the Rosses fields they
were driven out of in the 9th century, and plot their
return) and as to whether we were or were not once
the greatest orators in the world. All the past had
been turned into a melodrama with Ireland for
blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian had
but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and
only a minority doubted that the greater the talent
the greater the hiss. It was all the harder to sub-

90

stitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art,
because there really had been, however different in
their form, villain and victim ; yet fight that rancour I
must, and if I had not made some head against it in
1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John
Synge, the greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. 1
am writing of disputes that happened many years ago,
that led in later years to much bitterness, and I may
exaggerate their immediate importance and violence,
but I think I am right in saying that disputes about
the merits of Young Ireland so often interrupted our
discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that
lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the
current wrangle between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite
that they delayed our public appearance for a year.
Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we are
of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up
from their rancours to the dead Lord Mayors upon
the wall, superior men whose like we shall not see
again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly
academic. I was preparing the way without knowing
it for a great satirist and master of irony, for master
works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite
in one man's mind, and to help me I had already
flitting through my head, jostling other ideas and so
not yet established there, a conviction that we should
satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises
from the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had
dreaded, declamatory, loose, and bragging, we were
but the better fitted, that once declared and measured,
to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold
and passionate, daring long premeditated act ; and if
bitter beyond all the people of the world, we might
yet lie, that too declared and measured, nearest the
honeyed comb : —

91

" Like the clangour of a bell
Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,
That is how he learnt so well
To take the roses for his meat."

IV

THERE were others with followers of their own, and
too old or indifferent to join our society. Old men
who had never accepted Young Ireland, or middle-
aged men kept by some family tradition to the school
of thought before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel
O'Connell and of Lever and of Thomas Moore, con-
vivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile.
They sang Moore's Melodies , admitted no poetry but
his, and resented Young Ireland's political objections
to it as much as my generation's objection to its
artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial
traveller, a Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and
the animal vigour of youth, frequented the houses of
our leading men, and would say in a loud voice,
" Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of
ancient or modern times." I think it was the Fire
Worshippers in Lalla Rookh that he preferred to
Homer; or, jealous for the music of the Melodies,
denounce Wagner, then at the top of his vogue ; " I
would run ten miles through a bog to escape him,"
he would cry. Then there was a maker of tomb-
stones of whom we had heard much but had seen
little, an elderly fighting man, lately imprisoned for
beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the
London society, afterwards librarian to the National
University, D. J. O'Donphue, who had published a
dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think, two

92

thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there
in a fit of patriotism. He had been born in London,
and spoke the most Cockney dialect imaginable, and
had picked up — probably from London critics — a dis-
like for the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tomb-
stone maker invited him to tea, and he arrived with a
bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the
table. During tea he began expounding that dislike
of his; his host was silent, but he went on, for he
was an obstinate little man. Presently the tomb-
stone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, " I have
have never permitted that great poet to be slandered
in my presence," seized his guest by the back of the
collar, and flung him out into the street, and after
that flung out the books one after another. Mean-
while the guest — as he himself told the tale — stood in
the middle of the street repeating, " Nice way to
treat a man in your own 'ouse."

I SHARED a lodging full of old books and maga-
zines, covered with dirt and dust, with the head of the
Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Leary. " In this
country," he had said to me, " a man must have
upon his side the Church or the Fenians, and you
will never have the Church." He had been converted
to nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished
for some analogous movement to that of Davis, but he
had known men of letters, had been the friend of
Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature.
We had made him the President of our Society, and
without him I could do nothing, for his long imprison-

ment and longer exile, his magnificent appearance,
and, above all, the fact that he alone had personality,
a point of view not made for the crowd's sake, but
for self-expression, made him magnetic to my genera-
tion. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed
with us at Bedford Park, and my father had painted
his portrait, but if I had not shared his lodging he
would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my
point of view was not that of his youth, and it often
took me half the day to make him understand — so
suspicious he was of all innovation — some simple thing
that he would presently support with ardour. He
had grown up in a European movement when the
revolutionist thought that he, above all men, must
appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal
principle, be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he
had lived to see the change Dostoievsky examined in
The Possessed. Men who had been of his party — and
oftener their sons — preached assassination and the
bomb ; and, worst of all, the majority of his country-
men followed after constitutional politicians who
practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such
low morals that they would lie, or publish private
correspondence, if it might advance their cause. He
would split every practical project into its constituent
elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not
lead into some moral error; but, were the project
revolutionary, he would sometimes temper condemna-
tion with pity. Though he would cast off his oldest
acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders
with some carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of
a man who blew himself up in an attempt to blow up
Westminster Bridge, " He was not a bad man, but
he had too great a moral nature for his intellect, not
that he lacked intellect." He did not explain, but

94

he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of injustice

might madden a good man more quickly than some

common man. Such men were of his own sort,

though gone astray, but the constitutional politicians

he had been fighting all his life, and all they did

displeased him. It was not that he thought their aim

wrong, or that they could not achieve it; he had

accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill ; but that in his

eyes they degraded manhood. " If England has been

brought to do us justice by such men," he would

say, " that is not because of our strength, but because

of her weakness." He had a particular hatred for

the rush of emotion that followed the announcement

of Gladstone's conversion, for what was called " The

Union of Hearts," and derided its sentimentality;

" Nations may respect one another," he would say,

" they cannot love." His ancestors had probably

kept little shops, or managed little farms in County

Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never

used the word either for praise or blame, with more

than feudal hatred. " No gentleman can be a

socialist," he said, and then, with a thoughtful look,

" He might be an anarchist." He had no philosophy,

but things distressed his palate, and two of those

things were International propaganda and the

Organised State, and Socialism aimed at both, nor

could he speak such words as " philanthropy,"

" humanitarianism," without showing by his tone of

voice that they offended him. The Church pleased

him little better; there was an old Fenian quarrel

there, and he would say, " My religion is the old

Persian, to pull the bow and tell the truth." He

had no self-consciousness, no visible pride, and would

have hated anything that could have been called a

gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to invent a

95

gesture ; yet he would never speak of the hardship of
his prison life — though abundantly enough of its
humours — and once, when I pressed him, replied, " I
was in the hands of my enemy, why should I com-
plain?" A few years ago I heard that the Governor of
the prison had asked why he did not report some
unnecessary discomfort, and O'Leary had said, " I
did not come here to complain." Now that he is
dead, I wish that I could question him, and perhaps
discover whether in early youth he had come across
some teacher who had expounded Roman virtue, but
I doubt if I would have learnt anything, for I think
the wax had long forgotten the seal — if seal there
were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent
humanitarian 'forties and 'fifties, and was one kind
with that that had moulded the youthful mind of
Savage Landor. Stephens, the founder of Fenianism,
had discovered him searching the second-hand book-
stalls for rare editions, and enrolled him in his organi-
zation. "You have no chance of success," O'Leary had
said "but it will be good for the morale of the country"
(morale was his great word), " and I will join on the
condition that I am never asked to enrol anybody."
He still searched the second-hand bookstalls, and had
great numbers of books, especially of Irish history
and literature, and when I, exhausted over our
morning's casuistry, would sit down to my day's work
(I was writing The Secret Rose) he would make
his tranquil way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening,
over his coffee, he would write passages for his
memoirs upon postcards and odd scraps of paper,
taking immense trouble with every word and comma,
for the great work must be a masterpiece of style.
When it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry,
abstract, and confused; no picture had ever passed

96

before his mind's eye. He was a victim, I think, of
a movement where opinions stick men together, or
keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and with-
out any relation to their natural likes and tastes, and
where men of rich nature must give themselves up
to an irritation which they no longer recognise be-
cause it is always present. I often wonder why he
gave me his friendship, why it was he who found
almost all the subscribers for my Wanderings of
Usheen, and why he now supported me in all I did,
for how could he like verses that were all picture, all
emotion, all association, all mythology? He could
not have approved my criticism either, for I exalted
Mask and Image above the 18th century logic which
he loved, and set experience before observation,
emotion before fact. Yet he would say, " I have only
three followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston," and
presently he cast out Rolleston — " Davitt wants to
convert thousands, but I want two or three." I
think that perhaps it was because he no more wished
to strengthen Irish Nationalism by second-rate
literature than by second-rate morality, and was con-
tent that we agreed in that. " There are things a
man must not do to save a Nation," he had once told
me, and when I asked what things, had said, " To cry
in public," and I think it probable that he would have
added, if pressed, " To write oratorical or insincere
verse."

O'Leary's movements and intonations were full of
impulse, but John F. Taylor's voice in private dis-
cussion had no emotional quality except in the
expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it moved
from the shoulder or elbow alone, and when he walked
he moved from the waist only, and seemed an auto-
maton, a wooden soldier, as if he had no life that

97

was not dry and abstract. Except at moments of
public oratory, he lacked all personality, though when
one saw him respectful and gentle with O'Leary, as
with some charming woman, one saw that he felt its
fascination. In letters, or in painting, it repelled him
unless it were harsh and obvious, and, therefore,
though his vast erudition included much art and
letters, he lacked artistic feeling, and judged every-
thing by the moral sense. He had great ambition,
and had he joined some established party, or found
some practicable policy, he might have been followed,
might have produced even some great effect, but he
must have known that in defeat no man would follow
him, as they followed O'Leary, as they followed Par-
nell. His oratory was noble, strange, even beautiful,
at moments the greatest I have ever listened to ; but,
the speech over, where there had been, as it seemed, so
little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we
saw precisely as before an ungainly body in unsuit-
able, badly-fitting clothes, and heard an excited voice
speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew
that he could never give us that one price we would
accept, that he would never find a practicable policy ;
that no party would admit, no government negotiate
with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave
him genius, could at times carry him to the edge of
insanity.

Born in some country town, the son of some little
watchmaker, he had been a shop assistant, put himself
to college and the bar, learned to speak at temper-
ance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was
now a Queen's Counsel famous for his defence of
country criminals, whose cases had seemed hopeless —
Taylor's boys, their neighbours called them or they
called themselves. He had shaped his style and his
G

98

imagination from Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-
educated men in the 'eighties and early 'nineties.
" I prefer Emerson's Oversoul," the Condalkin
cobbler said to me, " but I always read Carlyle when
I am wild with the neighbours " ; but he used his
master's style, as Mitchell had done before, to abase
what his master loved, to exalt what his master
scorned. His historical erudition seemed as vast as
that of York Powell, but his interests were not
Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's
eye, and had but one object — a plea of not guilty —
entered in his country's name before a jury which he
believed to be packed. O'Leary cared nothing for
his country's glory, its individuality alone seemed
important in his eyes; he was like some man, who
serves a woman all his life without asking whether she
be good or bad, wise or foolish ; but Taylor cared for
nothing else; he was so much O'Leary 's disciple that
he would say in conversation, " We are demoralised,
what case for change if we are not?" for O'Leary
admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life,
but when he spoke to the great plea he would make
no admission. He spoke to it in the most obscure
places, in little halls in back streets where the white-
washed walls are foul with grease from many heads,
before some audience of medical students or of shop
assistants, for he was like a man under a curse, com-
pelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in
conspicuous places his ill judgment and his temper.

His distaste for myself, broken by occasional toler-
ance, in so far as it was not distaste for an imagina-
tion that seemed to him aesthetic rather than
ethical, was because I had published Irish folk-lore
in English reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of
the Irish peasantry, and because, England within

earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland prose
and poetry. He would have hated The Playboy of
the Western World, and his death a little before
its performance was fortunate for Synge and myself.
His articles are nothing, and his one historical
work, a life of Hugh O'Neill, is almost nothing,
lacking the living voice; and now, though
a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but
for the fading memory of a few friends, and for
what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did
not Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man
against pre-occupation with arts that cannot survive
his death?

VI

WHEN Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there
would be nothing more about Irish Literature for
twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the
land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but
imagination had begun to stir again. I had the same
confidence in the future that Lady Gregory and I
had eight or nine years later, when we founded an
Irish Theatre, though there were neither, as it
seemed, plays or players. There were already a few
known men to start my popular series, and to keep
it popular until the men, whose names I did not know,
had learnt to express themselves. I had met Dr.
Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was
still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting
in college rooms for the first time a very dark young
man, who filled me with surprise, partly because he
had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly
because there was something about his vague serious

100

eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that suggested a
different civilization, a different race. I had set him
down as a peasant, and wondered what brought him
to college, and to a Protestant college, but somebody
explained that he belonged to some branch of the
Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant
Rector for father. He had much frequented the
company of old countrymen, and had so acquired the
Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for
moderate quantities of a detestable species of illegal
whiskey distilled from the potato by certain of his
neighbours. He had already — though intellectual
Dublin knew nothing of it — considerable popularity
as a Gaelic poet, mowers and reapers singing his songs
from Donegal to Kerry. Years afterwards I was to
stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers singing
his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they
sang. It is so in India, where peasants sing the words
of the great poet of Bengal without knowing whose
words they sing, and it must often be so where the
old imaginative folk life is undisturbed, and it is so
amongst schoolboys who hand their story books to
one another without looking at the title page to read
the author's name. Here and there, however,
the peasants had not lost the habit of Gaelic criticism,
picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took refuge
among them after the ruin of the great Catholic
families, from men like that O'Rahilly, who cries in
a translation from the Gaelic that is itself a master-
piece of concentrated passion —

" The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish
Towards evening time have got into my dish."

An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a
fortnight by some Connaught village under the belief

101

that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, " the pleasant little
branch," as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the news-
papers where the villagers had found his songs. The
impostor's thirst only strengthened belief in his
genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had the
infirmities of Robert Burns, " It is not the drink but
the company," one of the last has sung. Since that
first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had corresponded,
and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my
Faery and Folk Tales, and I think I had something to
do with the London publication of his Beside the
Fire, a book written in the beautiful English of
Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in
vocabulary, and indeed, the first book to use it in the
expression of emotion and romance, for Carleton and
his school had turned it into farce. Henley had
praised him, and York Powell had said, " If he goes
on as he has begun, he will be the greatest folk-loreist
who has ever lived " ; and I know no first book of
verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so
concrete as his Gaelic A bhla de'n Craoibh ; but in a
few years Dublin was to laugh him, or rail him, out
of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having in-
deed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no
educated Irish or Englishman has ever had it, writing
out of an imitative sympathy like that of a child catch-
ing a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune ;
and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern
Irish literature permitted the ruin of that genius. He
was to create a great popular movement, far more
important in its practical results than any movement
I could have made, no matter what my luck, but,
being neither quarrelsome nor vain, he will not be
angry if I say — for the sake, of those who come after
us — that I mourn for the " greatest folk-loreist who

102

ever lived," and for the great poet who died in his
youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got him and the
Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in
our common English — " It must be either English
or Irish," said some patriotic editor, Young Ireland
practice in his head — that needs such sifting that he
who would write it vigorously must write it like a
learned language, and took for his model the news-
paper upon his breakfast table, and became for no
base reason beloved by multitudes who should never
have heard his name till their schoolmasters showed
it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for criticism
made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual
men and women ; " He should not be in the world
at all," said one admiring elderly woman, " or doing
the world's work " ; and for certain years young Irish
women were to display his pseudonym, " Craoibhin
Aoibhin," in gilt letters upon their hat bands.

" Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin, impart to us,

We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please ;

Is there a bridle for this Proteus

That turns and changes like his draughty seas,

Or is there none, most popular of men,

But, when they mock us, that we mock again? "

VII

STANDISH O'Grady, upon the other hand, was at
once all passion and all judgment. And yet those
who knew him better than I assured me he could find
quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had
quarrelled a few years back with Jack Nettleship.
Nettleship's account had been, " My mother cannot
endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus

108

Christ; whereas I like the God of the Old Testament,
and cannot endure Jesus Christ; and we have got
into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch ; and once,
when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the
most disgraceful spectacle he had ever seen, and
walked out." Indeed, I wanted him among my
writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much
passion and little rancour, the more he quarrelled,
the nobler, the more patched with metaphor, the
more musical his style became, and if he were in his
turn attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made
us murmur, " We do it wrong, being so majestical,
to offer it the show of violence." Sometimes he
quarrelled most where he loved most. A Unionist in
politics, a leader-writer on The Daily Express, the
most Conservative paper in Ireland, hater of every
form of democracy, he had given all his heart to the
smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and
with whom his childhood had been spent, and for
them he wrote his books, and would soon rage over
their failings in certain famous passages that many
men would repeat to themselves like poets' rhymes.
All round us people talked or wrote for victory's sake,
and were hated for their victories — but here was a
man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had
held most dear, and to whom for that very reason
every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion of his
soul. In his unfinished History of Ireland he
had made the old Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and
Cuchullan, alive again, taking them, for I think he
knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O 'Curry and
his school, and condensing and arranging, as he
thought Homer would have arranged and condensed.
Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping
closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of

104

arrangement and a more original style, but O'Grady
was the first, and we had read him in our 'teens. I think
that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have
changed him little, and that his genius would have
stayed, as it had been shaped by his youth in some
provincial society, and that to the end he would have
shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But
I do think that if, instead of that one admirable little
book The Bog of Stars, we had got all his
histories and imaginative works into the hands of our
young men, he might have brought the imagination
of Ireland nearer the Image and the honeycomb.

Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all
our theologian, for he had been converted to
Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to
question, had accepted all that we did, and most of
our plans. Historic Catholicism, with all its counsels
and its dogmas, stirred his passion like the beauty of
a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who
thought good literature or good criticism dangerous
were in his eyes " all heretics." He belonged to a
family that had called itself Irish some generations
back, and its recent English generations but enabled
him to see as one single sacred tradition Irish nation-
ality and Catholic religion. How should he fail to
know the Holy Land? Had he not been in Egypt?
He had joined our London Irish Literary Society,
attended its committee meetings, and given lectures
in London, in Dublin, and in Belfast, on Irish
novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always,
and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken
lectures, could not, perhaps because Ireland had still
the shape it had received from the eighteenth century,
and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his elabo-
rate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance

105

he seemed but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember
saying one night at the Rhymers', when he spoke of
passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials,
then a dangerous neighbourhood, " Who would
expect to find anything in your pockets but a pegtop
and a piece of string?" But one never thought of
his small stature when he spoke or read. He had the
delicate strong features of a certain filleted head of
a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an archaistic
Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth
century, and that resemblance seemed symbolic of the
austere nobility of his verse. He was now in his best
years, writing with great ease and power ; neither I,
nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy.

He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while
he was still at the University, had recommended
alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep, increased
the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of
chloral, and now he drank for drinking's sake. He
drank a great deal too much, and, though nothing
could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his
hand or foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of
glasses, would become more ascetic, more contemptu-
ous of all that we call human life. I have heard him,
after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church
father who freed himself from sexual passion by a sur-
gical operation, and deny with scorn, and much histori-
cal evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of
intellectual power. Even without stimulant his
theology conceded nothing to human weakness, and
I can remember his saying with energy, " I wish those
people who deny the eternity of punishment could
realise their unspeakable vulgarity."

Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to
use a favourite adjective of his, " marmorean "

106

verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to
keep down his own turbulence. One image of that
stay in Dublin is so clear before me that it has
blotted out most other images of that time. He is
sitting at a lodging-house table, which I have just
left at three in the morning, and round him lie or
sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in various
states of intoxication : and he is looking straight be-
fore him with head erect, and one hand resting upon
the table. As I reach the stairs I hear him say, in
a clear, unshaken voice, " I believe in nothing but
the Holy Roman Catholic Church." He sometimes
spoke of drink as something which he could put
aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I
think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly
enter a monastery. Did he deceive us deliberately?
Did he himself already foresee the moment when he
would write The Dark Angel? I am almost certain
that he did, for he had already written Mystic and
Cavalier, where the historical setting is, I believe,,
but masquerade.

" Go from me : I am one of those, who fall.
What ! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
In my sad company ? Before the end,
Go from me, dear my friend!

Yours are the victories of light : your feet
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet*
But after warfare in a mourning gloom
I rest in clouds of doom.

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear ?
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds :
Dimness, and airy shrouds.

107

O rich and sounding voices of the air !
Interpreters and prophets of despair :
Priests of a fearful sacrament ! I come
To make with you my home."

VIII

SIR Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with
him much manuscript, the private letters of a Young
Ireland poetess, a dry but informing unpublished
historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by
William Carleton, into the middle of which he had
dropped a hot coal, so that nothing remained but the
borders of every page. He hired a young man to
read him, after dinner, Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-
Worship, and before dinner was gracious to all our
men of authority and especially to our Harps and
Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus re-
turning to Ithaca, and every newspaper published his
biography. He was a white-haired old man, who had
written the standard history of Young Ireland, had
emigrated to Australia, had been the first Australian
Federalist, and later Prime Minister, but, in all his
writings, in which there is so much honesty, so little
rancour, there is not one sentence that has any mean-
ing when separated from its place in argument or
narrative, not one distinguished because of its thought
or music. One imagined his youth in some little gaunt
Irish town, where no building or custom is revered
for its antiquity; and there speaking a language
where no word, even in solitude, is ever spoken slowly
and carefully because of emotional implication; and
of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece
of orange-peel in the corner of the stairs as one

108

climbs up to some newspaper office ; of public meetings
where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality
to speak, or even to think of anything that might
cause a moment's misunderstanding in one's own party.
No argument of mine was intelligible to him, and I
would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he
had made an enemy, and though that enemy was long
dead, his school remained. He had attacked, why or
with what result I do not remember, the only Young
Ireland politician who had music and personality,
though rancorous and devil-possessed. At some
public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great
applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his pro-
posed Irish publishing firm, one heard faint hostile
murmurs, and at last a voice cried, " Remember
Newry," and a voice answered, " There is a grave
there ! " and a part of the audience sang, "Here's to
John Mitchell that is gone, boys, gone; Here's to
the friends that are gone." The meeting over, a
group of us, indignant that the meeting we had
called for his welcome should have contained those
malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He
had written a pamphlet, he explained : he would give
us copies. We would see that he was in the right,
how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland
personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers,
and some of us, I think, may have gone home mutter-
ing, " How dare he be in the right if Mitchell is in
the wrong?"

IX

HE wanted " to complete the Young Ireland move-
ment " — to do all that had been left undone because
of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own

emigration; and all the younger men were upon my
side in resisting that. They might not want the
books I wanted, but they did want books written by
their own generation, and we began to struggle with
him over the control of the company. Taylor be-
came very angry, and I can understand what I looked
like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis 's
seriously-intended warning, "It is bad manners for
a man under thirty to permit himself to be in the
right." But John O'Leary supported me through-
out.

When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw
up articles of association for his company, for which
he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the dis-
pute became very fierce. One night members of the
general public climbed the six flights of stairs to our
committee room, now no longer in the Mansion
House, and found seats for themselves just
behind our chairs. We were all too angry to send
them away, or even to notice their presence, for I
was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork,
" Our books," when I should have said, "Sir Charles
Gavan Duffy's books." I was not Taylor's match
with the spoken word, and barely matched him with
the written word. At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I
was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary 's support
was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he
would desert me if I used a bad argument, and would
not return till I found a good one ; and our chairman,
Dr. Hyde, " most popular of men," sat dreaming of
his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our
very success had been a misfortune, for an opposition
which had been literary and political, now that it
had spread to the general public, brought religious
prejudice to its aid. Suddenly, when the company

110

seemed all but established, and a scheme had been
thought out which gave some representation on its
governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan
Duffy produced a letter from Archbishop Walsh, and
threw the project up. The letter had warned him
that after his death the company would fall under a
dangerous influence. At this moment the always
benevolent friend, to whom I had explained in con-
fidence, when asking his support, my arrangements
with my publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and
suggested that they should together offer Mr Fisher
Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin
and his reader accepted the series under the belief
that it was my project that they accepted. I went
to London to find the contract signed, and that all
I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed,
responsible to the two societies. Two or three good
books were published, especially Dr. Hyde's Short
History of Gaelic Literature, and Standish O'Grady's
Bog of Stars; but the series was killed by its
first volume, Thomas Davis 's dry but informing
historical essay. So important had our move-
ment seemed that ten thousand copies had been sold
before anybody had time to read it, and then came a
dead stop.

Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was
guiltless, and my friend had heard me discuss many
things that evening. I had perhaps dispraised the
humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in his first
vogue, and praised Francis Thompson, but half-
rescued from his gutter; or flouted his belief in the
perpetual marriage of genius and virtue by numbering
the vices of famous men; this man's venery, that
man's drink. He could not be expected to remember
that where I had said so much of no account, I said

Ill

one thing, and he had made no reply, that I thought
of great account. He died a few months ago, and it
would have surprised and shocked him if any man had
told him that he was unforgiven; had he not for-
gotten all about it long ago? A German doctor has
said that if we leave an umbrella at a friend's house
it is because we have a sub-conscious desire to re-visit
that house ; and he had perhaps a sub-conscious desire
that my too tumultuous generation should not have
its say.

I WAS at Sligo when I received a letter from John
O'Leary, saying that I could do no more in Dublin,
for even the younger men had turned against me,
were "jealous," his letter said, though what they
had to be jealous of God knows. He said further
that it was all my own fault, that he had warned me
what would happen if I lived on terms of intimacy
with those I tried to influence. I should have kept
myself apart and alone. It was all true; through
some influence from an earlier generation, from Walt
Whitman, perhaps, I had sat talking in public bars,
had talked late into the night at many men's houses,
showing all my convictions to men that were but ready
for one, and used conversation to explore and discover
among men who looked for authority. I did not yet
know that intellectual freedom and social equality
are incompatible ; and yet, if I had, could hardly have
lived otherwise, being too young for silence. The
trouble came from half a dozen obscure young men,
who having nothing to do attended every meeting and
were able to overturn a project, that -seemed my only
bridge to other projects, including a travelling

112

theatre. We had planned small libraries of Irish
literature in connection with our country branches;
we collected books and money, sending a lecturer to
every branch and taking half the proceeds of that
lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne, whose beauty
could draw a great audience in any country town,
had been the lecturer. The scheme was very nearly
self-supporting, and six or seven bundles of books,
chosen after much disputation by John O'Leary, J.
F. Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some
six or seven branches. " The country will support
this work " Taylor had said somewhere on some
public platform, " because we are the most
inflammable people on God's earth," his harsh voice
giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian common-
place ; but we are also a very jealous people. The
half-a-dozen young men, if a little jealous of me, were
still more jealous of those country branches which
were getting so much notice, and where there was so
much of that peasant mind their schoolmasters had
taught them to despise. One must be English or
Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a
great box of books appropriated for some Dublin pur-
pose and the whole scheme abandoned. I know that
it was a bitter moment because I remember with
gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear,
by a young man who had lately joined our Society,
Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst
scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus,
and I seem to remember that I lost through anger
what gift of persuasion I may possess, and that I was
all the more helpless because I felt that even the
best of us disagreed about everything at heart. I
began to feel that I needed a hostess more than a
society, but that I was not to find for years to come.

113

I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess,
but her social life was in Paris, and she had already
formed a new ambition, the turning of French public
opinion against England. Without intellectual free-
dom there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist
Dublin there was not — indeed there still is not — any
society where a man is heard by the right ears, but
never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks
his whole mind gaily, and is not the cautious husband
of a part ; where phantasy can play before matured
into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and
lack utility. Mere life lacking the protection of
wealth or rank, or some beauty's privilege of caprice
cannot choose its company, taking up and dropping
men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners
and their looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and
rends, and all is hatred and bitterness : wheel biting
upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a mill of
argument grinding all things down to mediocrity. If,
as I think, minds and metals correspond the gold-
smiths of Paris foretold the French Revolution when
they substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in
the manufacture of the more expensive jewel work,
and made those large, flat steel buttons for men of
fashion whereby the card players were able to cheat
by studying the reflections of the cards.

XI

NO country could have more natural distaste for
equality, for in every circle there was some man
ridiculous for posing as the type of some romantic or
distinguished quality. One of our friends, a man of
H

114

talent and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he
believed, from Denmark in the ninth century, looked
and talked the distinguished foreigner so perfectly
that a patriotic newspaper gave particulars of his
supposed relations in contemporary Denmark! A
half-mad old man who had served for a few months
in the Pope's army, many years before, still rode an
old white warhorse in all national processions, and,
if their enemies were not lying, one Town Councillor
had challenged another to a duel by flinging his
glove upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor
had boasted in a public speech that he never went to
bed at night without reading at least twelve pages of
Sappho. Then, too, in those conversations of the
small hours, to which O'Leary had so much objected,
whenever we did not speak of art and letters, we
spoke of Parnell. We told each other that he had
admitted no man to his counsel ; that when some
member of his party found himself in the same hotel
by chance, that member would think to stay there a
presumption, and move to some other lodging; and,
above all, we spoke of his pride, that made him hide
all emotion while before his enemy. Once he had
seemed callous and indifferent to the House of
Commons, Foster had accused him of abetting
assassination, but when he came among his followers
his hands were full of blood, because he had torn
them with his nails. What excitement there would
have been, what sense of mystery would have stirred
all our hearts, and stirred hearts all through the
country, where there was still, and for many years to
come, but one overmastering topic, had we known the
story Mrs. Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton Pier.
He and the woman that he loved stood there upon a
night of storm, when his power was at its greatest

115

height, and still unthreatened. He caught her from the
ground and held her at arm's length out over the
water and she lay there motionless, knowing that,
had she moved, he would have drowned himself and
her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that
possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and
night, were as great evidence as such a man could
give of power over self, and so of the expression of
the self.

XII

WHEN I look back upon my Irish propaganda of
those years I can see little but its bitterness. I never
met with, or but met to quarrel with, my father's old
family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself
might have found, and kept, among the prosperous
educated class, who had all the great appointments
at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate
calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed
sacred to Irish nationalist opinion, I must, I knew,
see to it that no man suspect me of doing it to flatter
Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of
some man who belonged by birth and education to
University or Castle, I would say, " Now you must
be baptized of the gutter." I chose Royal visits
especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up
with my own hands the red carpet spread by some
elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by time, to
welcome Viceroyalty ; and threatening, if the London
Society drank to the King's health, that my friends
and I would demonstrate against it by turning our
glasses upside down; and. was presently to discover
that one can grow impassioned and fanatical about

116

opinions, which one has chosen as one might choose
a side upon the football field ; and I thought many a
time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never
ask me to dine; and the still pleasanter houses with
trout-streams near at hand, that would never ask me
upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing
about me in certain public places, the private view of
our Academy, or the like, to discover imagined
enemies ; and even now, after twenty or thirty years,
I feel at times that I have not recovered my natural
manner. Yet it was in those pleasant houses, among
the young men and the young girls, that we were to
make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our
world, if that loathing but turn to intellect, we see
self or world and its anti-self as in one vision ; when
loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes
itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite.
Popular Nationalism and Unionism so changed into
one another, being each but the other's headache.
The Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas
of some hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned
into stone, and all the rest a seething and burning ;
and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething
and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those
fixed ideas to whatever might bring the most easy and
obvious success.

I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of
body and tense of voice ; and the contrasting figure of
Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of the
moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory
to hear and impossible to remember. Taylor speaks
of a little nation of antiquity, which he does not
name, " set between the great Empire of Persia and
the great Empire of Rome." Into the mouths of
those great Empires he puts the arguments of Fitz-

117

gibbon, and such as he, " Join with our greatness!
What in comparson to that is your little, beggarly
nationality?'* And then I recall the excitement, the
shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an ecstatic
cry, " Out of that nation came the salvation of the
world." I remember, too, and grow angry, as it were
yesterday, a letter from that Lord Justice of Appeal,
who had changed his politics for advancement's sake,
recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we
dissuaded people from the study of " Shakespeare
and Kingsley."

Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his
dark romantic face, the one man of letters Dublin
Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren
soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a
near friend that he would have wished before all
things to have been the lover of many women; and
some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had
in early life drawn down upon him the displeasure of
the Protestant Archbishop. And yet he turned
Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered
Shelley but to hide his own growing lack of sympathy,
abandoned for like reason that study of Goethe that
should have been his life-work, and at last cared but
for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief
blossom, was cut and sawn into planks of obvious
utility. I called upon him from time to time out of
gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among
the Dublin houses open to me, his alone was pleasant
to the eye, with its many books and its air of scholar-
ship. But when O'Grady had declared, rancorous for
once but under substantial provocation, that he had
" a bad head and a worse heart," I found my welcome
troubled and called no more.

118

XIII

THE one house where nobody thought or talked
politics was a house in Ely Place, where a number
of young men lived together, and, for want of a
better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the
resident members, other members dropped in and out
during the day, and the reading-room was a place of
much discussion about philosophy and about the arts.
The house had been taken in the name of the
engineer to the Board of Works, a black-bearded
young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy,
and all accepted him as host ; and sometimes the con-
versation, especially when I was there, became too
ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate wife,
and he would be made angry. I remember young
men struggling, with inexact terminology and in-
sufficient learning, for some new religious conception,
on which they could base their lives; and some few
strange or able men.

At the top of the house lived a medical student who
read Plato and took haschisch, and a young Scotch-
man who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and had just
returned from America, where he had gone as the
disciple of the Prophet Harris, and where he would
soon return in the train of some new prophet. When
one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of
a young Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose
cap was always plucked off at a certain twist in the
road, till the fathers of the village fastened it upon
his head by recommending drink and women. When
he had gone, his room was inherited by an American
hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni Indians
with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian
who, irritated by some white man's praise of telephone

119

and telegraph, cried out, " Can they do that?" and
cast above his head two handfuls of sand that burst
into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped
in fire. He professed to talk the philosophy of the
Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me the vague
Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke
much of men passing in sleep into the heart of
mountains ; a doctrine that was presently incorporated
in the mythology of the house, to send young men and
women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places.
On a lower floor lived a strange red-haired girl, all
whose thoughts were set upon painting and poetry,
conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury
in the Symposium-, and to these images she sacrificed
herself with Asiatic fanaticism. The engineer had dis-
covered her starving somewhere in an unfurnished or
half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many
weeks upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food
never cost her more than a penny a day. Born into
a county family, who were so haughty that their
neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had
quarrelled with a mad father, who had never, his
tenants declared, " unscrewed the top of his flask
with any man," because she wished to study art, had
ran away from home, had lived for a time by selling
her watch, and then by occasional stories in an Irish
paper. For some weeks she had paid half -a-cr own a
week to some poor woman to see her to the art schools
and back, for she considered it wrong for a woman
to show herself in public places unattended ; but of
late she had been unable to afford the school fees.
The engineer engaged her as a companion for his
wife, and gave her money enough to begin her
studies once more. She had talent and imagination,
a gift for style ; but, tKough ready to face death for

120

painting and poetry, conceived as allegorical figures,
she hated her own genius, and had not met praise and
sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred.
Face to face with paint and canvas, pen and paper,
she saw nothing of her genius but its cruelty, and
would have scarce arrived before she would find some
excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she
had not invented over her breakfast some occupation
so laborious that she could call it a duty, and so not
go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I
watched in sympathy ; composition strained my nerves
and spoiled my sleep ; and yet, as far back as I could
trace — and in Ireland we have long memories — my
paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual
pursuit, while hers had shot and hunted. She could
at any time, had she given up her profession, which
her father had raged against, not because it was art,
but because it was a profession, have returned to the
common comfortable life of women. When, a little
later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his
wife, and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa I
brought her an offer from some Dublin merchant of
fairly well paid advertisement work, which would
have been less laborious than artistic creation; but
she said that to draw advertisements was to degrade
art, thanked me elaborately, and did not disguise
her indignation. She had, I believe, returned to
starvation with joy, for constant anaemia would
shortly give her an argument strong enough to silence
her conscience when the allegorical images glared upon
her, and, apart from that, starvation and misery had
a large share in her ritual of worship.

121

XIV

AT the top of the house and at the time I
remember best, in the same room with the young
Scotchman, lived Mr. George Russell (A.E.), and the
house and the society were divided into his adherents
and those of the engineer ; and I heard of some quarrel-
ling between the factions. The rivalry was sub-con-
scious. Neither had willingly opposed the other in any
matter of importance. The engineer had all the finan-
cial responsibility, and George Russell was, in the eyes
of the community, saint and genius. Had either
seen that the question at issue was the leadership of
mystical thought in Dublin, he would, I think, have
given way, but the dispute seemed trivial. At the
weekly meetings, anything might be discussed; no
chairman called a speaker to order; an atheistic
workman could denounce religion, or a pious Catholic
confound theosophy with atheism; and the engineer,
precise and practical, disapproved. He had an object.
He wished to make converts for a definite form of
belief, and here an enemy, if a better speaker, might
make all the converts. He wished to confine discussion
to members of the society, and had proposed in com-
mittee, I was told, a resolution on the subject; while
Russell, who had refused to join my National Literary
Society, because the party of Harp and Pepperpot
had set limits to discussion, resisted, and at last
defeated him. In a couple of years some new dispute
arose ; he resigned, and founded a society which drew
doctrine and method from America or London; and
Russell became, as he is to-day, the one masterful
influence among young Dublin men and women who
love religious speculation, but have no historical faith.
When Russell and I had been at the Art School

122

six or seven years before, he had been almost
unintelligible. He had seemed incapable of coherent
thought, and perhaps was so at certain moments. The
idea came upon him, he has told me, that, if he spoke
he would reveal that he had lost coherence; and for
the three days that the idea lasted spent the hours
of daylight wandering upon the Dublin mountains,
that he might escape the necessity for speech. I used
to listen to him at that time, mostly walking through
the streets at night, for the sake of some stray
sentence, beautiful and profound, amid many words
that seemed without meaning ; and there were others,
too, who walked and listened, for he had become, I
think, to all his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is
sacred in the East. We copied the model laboriously,
but he would draw without research into the natural
form, and call his study " St. John in the Wilder-
ness " ; but I can remember the almost scared look
and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful
sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a
shoulder, " That is too easy, a great deal too easy I"
For with brush and pencil he was too coherent.

We derided each other, told absurd tales to one
another's discredit, but we never derided him, or told
tales to his discredit. He stood outside the sense of
comedy his friend John Eglinton has called " the
social cement" of our civilization; and we would
" gush " when we spoke of him, as men do when they
praise something incomprehensible. But when he
painted there was no difficulty in comprehending.
How could that ease and rapidity of composition, so
far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong
to a man whose words seemed often without meaning ?

A few months before I had come to Ireland he had
sent me some verses, which I had liked till Edwin

123

Ellis had laughed me from my liking by proving that
no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and
that, the moment one thought he had settled upon
some scheme of rhyme, he would break from it with-
out reason. But now his verse was clear in thought
and delicate in form. He wrote without premedita-
tion or labour. It had, as it were, organized itself,
and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as
Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The
Society he belonged to published a little magazine,
and he had asked the readers to decide whether they
preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because
they so willed it that he wrote the little transcendental
verses afterwards published in Homeward Songs by
the Way.

Life was not expensive in that house, where, I
think, no meat was eaten; I know that out of
the sixty or seventy pounds a year which he earned
as accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a consider-
able portion for his private charity ; and it was, I think,
his benevolence that gave him his lucidity of speech,
and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself
that any particular activity was desirable in the public
interest or in that of his friends, he had at once the
ardour that came to another from personal ambition.
He was always surrounded with a little group of infirm
or unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves
and to others, turning cat to griffin, goose to swan.
In later years he was to accept the position of
organizer of a co-operative banking system, before
he had even read a book upon economics or finance,
and within a few months to give evidence before a
Royal Commission upon the system, as an acknow-
ledged expert, though he had brought to it nothing
but his impassioned versatility.

124

At the time I write of him, he was the religious
teacher, and that alone — his painting, his poetry, and
his conversation all subservient to that one end.
Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it
was known that he saw visions continually, perhaps
more continually than any modern man since Sweden-
borg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what
he had seen, some accepted the record without hesita-
tion, others, like myself, noticing the academic
Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early
admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined
a subjective element, but no one doubted his word.
One might not think him a good observer, but no
one could doubt that he reported with the most
scrupulous care what he believed himself to have seen ;
nor did he lack occasional objective corroboration.
Walking with some man in his park — his demesne,
as we say in Ireland — he had seen a visionary church
at a particular spot, and the man had dug and un-
covered its foundations; then some woman had met
him with, " Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy," and
he had replied, " You will be perfectly happy this
evening at seven o'clock," and left her to her
blushes. She had an appointment with a young man
for seven o'clock. I had heard of this a day or so
after the event, and I asked him about it, and was
told it had suddenly come into his head to use those
words; but why he did not know. He and I often
quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine and
question his visions, and write them out as they
occurred; and still more because I thought symbolic
what he thought real like the men and women that
had passed him on the road. Were they so much a
'part of his sub-conscious life that they would have
vanished had he submitted them to question; were

125

they like those voices that only speak, those strange
sights that only show themselves for an instant, when
the attention has been withdrawn; that phantasms
goria of which I had learnt something in London:
and had his verse and his painting a like origin ? And
was that why the same hand that painted a certain
dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in the Dublin
Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many
canvases with poetical commonplace; and why, after
writing Homeward Songs by the Wai/, where all is
skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write
a perfect book ? Was it precisely because in Sweden-
borg alone the conscious and the sub-conscious be-
came one, as in that marriage of the angels, which he
has described as a contact of the whole being, that
Coleridge thought Swedenborg both man and woman ?
Russell's influence, which was already great, had
more to support it than his versatility, or the mystery
that surrounded him, for his sense of justice, and the
daring that came from his own confidence in it, had
made him the general counsellor. He would give
endless time to a case of conscience, and no situation
was too difficult for his clarity; and certainly some
of the situations were difficult. I remember his
being summoned to decide between two ladies who
had quarrelled about a vacillating admirer, and called
each other, to each other's faces, the worst names in
our somewhat anaemic modern vocabulary; and I
have heard of his success on an occasion when I think
no other but Dostoievsky's idiot could have avoided
offence. The Society was very young, and, as its
members faced the world's moral complexities as
though they were the first that ever faced them, they
drew up very vigorous rules. One rule was that if
any member saw a fault growing upon any other

126

member, it was his duty to point it out to that
member. A certain young man become convinced
that a certain young woman had fallen in love with
him ; and, as an unwritten rule pronounced love and
the spiritual life incompatible, that was a heavy
fault. As the young man felt the delicacy of the
situation, he asked for Russell's help, and side by
side they braved the offender, who, I was told, re-
ceived their admonishment with surprised humility,
and promised amendment. His voice would often
become high, and lose its self-possession during inti-
mate conversation, and I especially could put him in
a rage ; but the moment the audience became too
large for intimacy, or some exciting event had given
formality to speech, he would be at the same
moment impassioned and impersonal. He had, and
has, the capacity, beyond that of any man I have
known, to put with entire justice not only the
thoughts, but the emotions, of the most opposite
parties and personalities, as it were dissolving some
public or private uproar into drama by Corneille or
by Racine ; and men who have hated each other must
sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard
his enemy's argument put into better words than he
himself had found for his own ; and this gift was in
later years to give him political influence, and win
him respect from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike.
It was, perhaps, because of it, joined to a too literal
acceptance of those noble images of moral tradition
which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that
he had seen all human life as a mythological system,
where, though all cats are griffins, the more dangerous
griffins are only found among politicians he has not
spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at;
while those men and women who bring him their con-

127

fessions and listen to his advice, carry but the
snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to
make him, as I think, a bad literary critic ; demanding
plays and poems where the characters must attain a
stature of seven feet, and resenting as something
perverse and morbid all abatement from that
measure. I sometimes wonder what he would have
been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emer-
son and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to
seem superficial precisely because they lack the Vision
of evil; and those translations of the Upanishads,
which it is so much harder to study by the sinking
flame of Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp
of Emerson and Walt Whitman.

We are never satisfied with the maturity of those
whom we have admired in boyhood ; and, because we
have seen their whole circle — even the most successful
life is but a segment — we remain to the end their
harshest critics. One old schoolfellow of mine will
never believe that I have fulfilled the promise of some
rough unscannable verses that I wrote before I was
eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity
the admiration that his first half-articulate years
aroused in some little circle; and is not the first
success the greatest? Certainly, I demanded of
Russell some impossible things, and if I had any
influence upon him — and I have little doubt that I
had, for we were very intimate — it may not have been
a good influence for I thought there could be no aim
for poet or artist except expression of a " Unity of
Being" like that of a "perfectly proportioned
human body " — though I would not at the time have
used that phrase. I remember that I was ironic and
indignant when he left the Art Schools because his
"" will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed

128

any emotional pursuit;" as, later, when he let the
readers of a magazine decide between his prose and
his verse. I now know that there are men who cannot
possess " Unity of Being," who must not seek it or
express it — and who, so far from seeking an anti-self,
a Mask that delineates a being in all things the
opposite to their natural state, can but seek the
suppression of the anti-self, till the natural state alone
remains. These are those who must seek no image
of desire, but await that which lies beyond their mind,
unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, unities
of God : the man of science, the moralist, the humani-
tarian, the politicion, St. Simon Stylites upon his
pillar, St. Antony in his cavern; all whose pre-
occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and
at last for nothing ; to hollow their hearts out till
they are void and without form, to summon a creator
by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for another's
wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been
for their guidance in a very special sense that the
" perfectly proportioned human body " suffered
crucifixion. For them Mask and Image are of necessity
morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though
they were of those who can be law unto themselves, of
whom Chapman has written, "Neither is it lawful that
they should stoop to any other law," whereas they are
indeed of those who can but ask, "Have I behaved
as well as So-and-so ?" " Am I a good man according
to the commandments?" or, "Do I realise my own
nothingness before God?" "Have my experiments
and observations excluded the personal factor with
sufficient rigour?" Such men do not assume wisdom
or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as
Ahasuerus, or as Prince Athanais, nor do they pursue
an Image through a world that had else seemed an

129

uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of
that pursuit, the Image is no more named Pandemos,
but Urania; for such men must cast all Masks away
and fly the Image, till that Image, transfigured be-
cause of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes
itself some Image or epitome of the whole natural or
supernatural world, and itself pursues. The wholeness
of the supernatural world can only express itself in
personal form, because it has no epitome but man,
nor can The Hound of Heaven fling itself into any
but an empty heart. We may know the fugitives
from others poets because, like George Herbert, like
Francis Thompson, like George Russell, their
imaginations grow more vivid in the expression of
something which they have not themselves created,
some historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive
should live, as I. think Russell does at times, as it is
natural for a Morris or a Henley or a Shelley to live,
hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to
moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of
thoughts and images that have no relation to
experience.

I think that Russell would not have disappointed
even my hopes had he, instead of meeting as an
impressionable youth with our modern subjective
romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief,
which condemned all that romanticism admires and
praises, indeed, all images of desire; for such con-
demnation would have turned his intellect towards the
images of his vision. It might, doubtless, have
embittered his life, for his strong intellect would have
been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the
man shudders ; but it would have kept him a religious
teacher, and set him, it may be, among the greatest of
that species ; politics, for a vision-seeking man, can
I

130

be but half achievement, a choice of an almost easy
kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those
not impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain
that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder
and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the
delicate spiral of a shell?

XV

I HEARD the other day of a Dublin man recogniz-
ing in London an elderly man who had lived in that
house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly
man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears.
Though I have no such poignant memories, for I was
never of it, never anything but a dissatisfied critic,
yet certain vivid moments come back to me as I write.
. . . Russell has just come in from a long walk
on the Two Rock mountain, very full of his conversa-
tion with an old religious beggar, who kept repeating,
" God possesses the heavens, but He covets the
earth — He covets the earth."

• • • • •

I get in talk with a young man who has taken the
orthodox side in some debate. He is a stranger,
but explains that he has inherited magical art from
his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in
operation. He and a friend of his kill a black cock,
and burn herbs in a big bowl, but nothing happens
except that the friend repeats again and again, " Oh,
my God," and when I ask him why he has said that,
does not know that he has spoken; and I feel that
there is something very evil in the room.

181

We are sitting round the fire one night, and a
member, a woman, tells a dream that she has just had.
She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a garden.
They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they
took off the lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful
young man in a dress of gold brocade. The young
man railed against the glory of the world, and when
he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently,
and buried it once more. They smoothed the ground,
and then went on with their gardening.
• • • • •

I have a young man with me, an official of the
National Literary Society, and I leave him in the
reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to see
the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to
find that the young man has become a Theosophist,
but a month later, after an interview with a friar, to
whom he gives an incredible account of his new
beliefs, he goes to Mass again.

BOOK III
HODOS CAMELIONIS

HODOS CAMELIONIS

I

WHEN staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had
driven over to Lough Kay, hoping to find some local
memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, which
I was turning into a story now called Proud Costello ,
Macdermot's Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue. I
was rowed up the lake that I might find the island
where he died ; I had to find it from Hyde's account
in The Love-Songs of Connaught9 for when I asked
the boatman, he told the story of Hero and Leander,
putting Hero's house on one island, and Leander's
on another. Presently we stopped to eat our
sandwiches at the " Castle Rock," an island all castle.
It was not an old castle, being but the invention of
some romantic man, seventy or eighty years ago.
The last man who had lived there had been Dr.
Hyde's father, and he had but stayed a fortnight.
The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were
accustomed, instead of calling some specially useless
thing a " white elephant," to call it " The Castle on
the Rock." The roof was, however, still sound, and
the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre
of the lake, that has little wood-grown islands, and is
surrounded by wood-grown hills, is romantic, and at
one end, and perhaps at the other too, there is a stone
platform where meditative persons might pace to and
fro. I planned a mystical. Order which should buy
or hire the castle, and keep it as a place where its

135

186

members could retire for a while for contemplation,
and where we might establish mysteries like those of
Eleusis and Samothrace; and for ten years to come
my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to
find philosophy and to create ritual for that Order.
I had an unshakeable conviction, arising how or
whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates would open
as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Sweden-
borg, as they opened for Boehme, and that this
philosophy would find its manuals of devotion in all
imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for
special manual an Irish literature which, though made
by many minds, would seem the work of a single mind,
and turn our places of beauty or legendary association
into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy
would be altogether pagan, for it was plain that its
symbols must be selected from all those things that
had moved men most during many, mainly Christian,
centuries.

I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love,
calling it The Rose, because of the Rose's double
meaning ; of a fisherman who had " never a crack "
in his heart ; of an old woman complaining of the idle-
ness of the young, or of some cheerful fiddler, all
those things that " popular poets " write of, but that
I must some day, on that day when the gates began
to open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm
that still echoed Morris I prayed to the Red Rose,
to Intellectual Beauty :

" Come near, come near, come near — ah, leave me

still

A little space for the Rose-breath to fill,
Lest I no more hear common things . . .
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chant a tongue men do not know."

1ST

I do not remember what I meant by " the bright
hearts," but a little later I wrote of Spirits " with
mirrors in their hearts."

My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like
a poem, but all got by that method Mathers had
explained to me, and with this hope I plunged with-
out a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that
labyrinth that we are warned against in those
Oracles which antiquity has attributed to Zoroaster,
but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet.
" Stoop not down to the darkly spendid world wherein
lieth continually a faithless depth and Hades wrapped
in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images."

II

I FOUND a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a
man of fifty-three or fifty-four, with the habits of a
much older man. He had never left the West of
Ireland, except for a few days to London every year,
and a single fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a
trading schooner, in his boyhood. He was in politics
a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and
knew nothing of Irish literature or history. He was,
however, strangely beset by the romance of Ireland,
as he discovered it among the people who served him,
sailing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and,
though narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puri-
tanical in his judgment of life, was perhaps the most
tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected
anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset
his habits by cheating him over a horse, or by offend-
ing his taste, he would think as well of you as he did
of other men, and that was not very well; and help

138

you out of any scrape whatever. I was accustomed
to people much better read than he, much more
liberal-minded, but they had no life but the
intellectual life, and if they and I differed, they could
not take it lightly, and were often angry, and so for
years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I
could not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often
for freedom and peace. He would receive me with
" I have learned that your friend So and So has been
seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr William
Redmond. What will not people do for notoriety?"
He considered all Irish Nationalist Members of
Parliament as outside the social pale, but after
dinner, when conversation grew intimate, would talk
sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where he
spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer
that landed the wounded man at Sligo in the 'sixties.
When Parnell was contesting an election at Sligo a
little before his death, other Unionist magistrates
refused or made difficulties when asked for some
assistance, what I do not remember, made necessary
under election law; and so my uncle gave that
assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall
assembly-room or some courtroom with Parnell, but
would tell me nothing of that conversation, except
that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant
hatred. He would not repeat words spoken by a
great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at the
moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew
one other man who kept as firm a silence; he had
attended Parnell 's last public meeting, and after it
sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the
followers that had fallen away, or were showing their
faint hearts ; but Parnell was the chief devotion of his
life.

When I first began my visits, he had lived in the
town itself , and close to a disreputable neighbourhood
called the Burrough, till one evening, while he sat
over his dinner, he heard a man and woman
quarrelling under his window. " I mind the time,"
shouted the man, " when I slept with you and your
daughter in the one bed." My uncle was horrified,
and moved to a little house about a quarter of a mile
into the country, where he lived with an old second-
sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the
racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field,
with a donkey to keep it company. His furniture had
not been changed since he set up house for himself as
a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-
room were the saddles of his youth, and though he
would soon give up riding, they would be oiled and
the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of his
death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was
a very young man; he had now no interest in
women; certainly never sought favour of a woman,
and yet he took great care of his appearance. He
did not let his beard grow, though he had, or
believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal, a
sensitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an
hour in shaving, and he would take to club and dumb-
bell if his waist thickened by a hair's breadth, and
twenty years after, when a very old man, he had the
erect shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered
why he went through so much labour, for it was not
pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes — and
certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back,
I am convinced that it was from habit, mere habit,
a habit formed when he was a young man, and the
best rider of his district.

Probably through long association with Mary

140

Battle, the second-sighted servant, he had come to
believe much in the supernatural world, and would
tell how several times, arriving home with an un-
expected guest, he had found the table set for three,
and that he himself had dreamed of his brother's ill-
ness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He
saw me using images learned from Mathers to start
reverie, and, though I held out for a long time,
thinking him too old and habit-bound, he persuaded
me to tell him their use, and from that on we experi-
mented continually, and after a time I began to keep
careful record. In summer he always had the same
little house at Rosses Point, and it was there that
he first became sensitive to the cabalistic symbols.
There are some high sandhills and low cliffs, and I
adopted the practice of walking by the seashore while
he walked on cliff or sandhill; I, without speaking,
would imagine the symbol, and he would notice what
passed before his mind's eye, and in a short time he
would practically never fail of the appropriate vision.
In the symbols which are used certain colours are
classified as " actives," while certain other colours
are " passives," and I had soon discovered that if I
used " actives " George Pollexfen would see nothing.
I therefore gave him exercises to make him sensitive to
those colours, and gradually we found ourselves well
fitted for this work, and he began to take as lively an
interest, as was possible to a nature given over to
habit, in my plans for the Castle on the Rock.

I worked with others, sworn to the scheme for
the most part, and I made many curious observations.
It was the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not my
conscious intention that produced the effect, for if
I made an error and told someone, let us say, to gaze
at the wrong symbol — they were painted upon cards

141

— the vision would be suggested by the symbol, not
by my thought, or two visions would appear side by
side, one from the symbol and one from my thought.
When two people, between whose minds there was even
a casual sympathy, worked together under the same
symbolic influence, the dream or reverie would divide
itself between them, each half being the complement
of the other ; and now and again these complementary
dreams, or reveries, would arise spontaneously. I
find, for instance, in an old notebook, " I saw
quite suddenly a tent with a wooden badly-carved
idol, painted dull red; a man looking like a Red
Indian was prostrate before it. The idol was seated to
the left. I asked G. what he saw. He saw a most
august immense being, glowing with a ruddy opales-
cent colour, sitting on a throne to the left ", or, to
summarise from a later notebook, ... I am
meditating in one room and my fellow-student in
another, when I see a boat full of tumult and move-
ment on a still sea, and my friend sees a boat with
motionless sails upon a tumultuous sea. There was
nothing in the originating symbol to suggest a boat.
We never began our work until George's old ser-
vant was in her bed ; and yet, when we went upstairs
to our beds, we constantly heard her crying out with
nightmare, and in the morning we would find that
her dream echoed our vision. One night, started by
what symbol I forget, we had seen an allegorical
marriage of Heaven and Earth. When Mary Battle
brought in the breakfast next morning, I said,
" Well, Mary, did you dream anything last night ?"
and she replied (I am quoting from an old notebook)
" indeed she had," and that it was " a dream she
would not have liked to* have had twice in one night."
She had dreamed that her bishop, the Catholic bishop

142

of Sligo, had gone away " without telling anybody,"
and had married " a very high-up lady," " and she
not too young, either." She had thought in her
•dream, " Now all the clergy will get married, and
it will be no use going to confession." There were
" layers upon layers of flowers, many roses, all round
the church."

Another time, when George Pollexfen had seen in
answer to some evocation of mine a man with his
head cut in two, she woke to find that she " must
have cut her face with a pin, as it was all over
blood." When three or four saw together, the dream
or vision would divide itself into three or four parts,
each seeming complete in itself, and all fitting
together, so that each part was an adaptation of a
single meaning to a particular personality. A visionary
being would give, let us say, a lighted torch to one,
an unlighted candle to another, an unripe fruit to a
third, and to the fourth a ripe fruit. At times
coherent stories were built up, as if a company of
actors were to improvise, and play, not only without
previous consultation, but without foreseeing at any
moment what would be said or done the moment after.
Who made the story? Was it the mind of one of
the visionaries? Perhaps, for I have endless proof
that, where two worked together, the symbolic in-
fluence commonly took upon itself, though no word
was spoken, the quality of the mind that had first
fixed a symbol in the mind's eye. But, if so, what
part of the mind? One friend, in whom the
symbolic impulse produced actual trance, described
an elaborate and very strange story while the trance
was upon him, but upon waking told a story that
after a certain point was quite different. "They
gave me a cup of wine, and after that I remembered

143

nothing." While speaking out of trance he had said
nothing of the cup of wine, which must have been
offered to a portion of his mind quite early in the
dream. Then, too, from whence come the images of
the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from
the memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One
man, who certainly thought that Eve's apple was the
sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as cer-
tainly never doubted its story's literal truth, said,
when I used some symbol to send him to Eden, that
he saw a walled garden on the top of a high mountain,
and in the middle of it a tree with great birds in the
branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit
to your ear, came the sound of fighting. I had not
at the time read Dante's Purgatorio, and it caused
me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and,
from some passage in the Zohar, the great birds
among the boughs ; while a young girl, on being sent
to the same garden, heard " the music of heaven "
from a tree, and on listening with her ear against the
trunk, found that it was made by the " continual
clashing of swords." Whence came that fine thought
of music-making swords, that image of the garden,
and many like images and thoughts ? I had as yet no
clear answer, but knew myself face to face with the
Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers,
and more especially in modern times by Henry More,
which has a memory independent of individual
memories, though they constantly enrich it with their
images and their thoughts.

144
III

AT Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch
and once after dinner, to the same gate on the road
to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point, to the same
rock upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged
those thoughts that never rise before me now without
bringing some sight of mountain or of shore. Con-
sidering that Mary Battle received our thoughts in
sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do
not the thoughts of the scholar or the hermit, though
they speak rio word, or something of their shape and
impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the
emotion of some woman of fashion, caught in the
subtle torture of self-analysing passion, pass down,
although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot,
Jill with her Pail and, it may be, with one knows
not what nightmare melancholy to Tom the Fool?

Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers
complementary portions, might not the thought of
philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at every
moment of its progress upon some complementary
thought in minds perhaps at a great distance? Is
there nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind pass-
ing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams
acting and reacting upon one another, no matter
how distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A
man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet
one could never say which was man and which was
shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast. Was
not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance
comers, bound together by these parallel streams or
shadows; that Unity of Image, which I sought in
national literature, being but an originating symbol?

145

From the moment when these speculations grew
vivid, I had created for myself an intellectual solitude,
most arguments that could influence action had lost
something of their meaning. How could I judge any
scheme of education, or of social reform, when I
could not measure what the different classes and
occupations contributed to that invisible commerce
of reverie and of sleep ; and what is luxury and what
necessity when a fragment of gold braid, or a flower
in the wallpaper may be an originating impulse to
revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself
not only solitary but helpless.

IV

I HAD not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor
through love of strangeness, nor love of excitement,
nor because I found myself in some experimental
circle, but because unaccountable things had happened
even in my childhood, and because of an ungovern-
able craving. When supernatural events begin, a
man first doubts his own testimony, but when they
repeat themselves again and again, he doubts all
human testimony. At least he knows his own bias,
and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian
and psychologist that have for two hundred years
ignored in writing of the history of the world, or of
the human mind, so momentous a part of human
experience? What else had they ignored and dis-
torted? When Mesmerists first travelled about as
public entertainers, a favourite trick was to tell a
mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had
ceased to exist, and after that to make him write his
K

146

name upon the blackboard. Brown, or Jones, or
Robinson would become upon the instant, and with-
out any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or
Obinson.

Was modern civilisation a conspiracy of the sub-
conscious? Did we turn away from certain thoughts
and things because the Middle Ages lived in terror
of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed
upon us by beings greater than ourselves for an un-
known purpose? Even when no facts of experience
were denied, might not what had seemed logical proof
be but a mechanism of change, an automatic impulse ?
Once in London, at a dinner party, where all the
guests were intimate friends, I had written upon a
piece of paper, " In five minutes York Powell will
talk of a burning house," thrust the paper under my
neighbour's plate, and imagined my fire symbol, and
waited in silence. Powell shifted conversation from
topic to topic and within the five minutes was describ-
ing a fire he had seen as a young man. When Locke's
French translator Coste asked him how, if there were no
" innate ideas," he could explain the skill shown by
a bird in making its nest, Locke replied, " I did not
write to explain the actions of dumb creatures," and
his translator thought the answer " very good, see-
ing that he had named his book A Philosophical Essay
upon Human Understanding." Henry More, upon
the other hand, considered that the bird's instinct
proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its
ideas and memories. Did modern enlightenment think
with Coste that Locke had the better logic, because
it was not free to think otherwise?

147

I CEASED to read modern books that were not books
of belief older than any European Church, and founded
that interested me, I tried to trace it back to its
earliest use, believing that there must be a tradition
of belief older than any European Church, and founded
upon the experience of the world before the modern
bias. It was this search for a tradition that urged
George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and
thoughts of the country people, and some country
conversation repeated by one or the other often gave
us a day's discussion. These visions, we soon dis-
covered, were very like those we called up by symbol.
Mary Battle, looking out of the window at Rosses
Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen
Maeve, according to local folklore, is buried under a
great heap of stones, " the finest woman you ever
saw travelling right across from the mountains and
straight to here." — I quote a record written at the
time. " She looked very strong, but not wicked "
(that is to say, not cruel). " I have seen the Irish
Giant " (some big man shown at a fair). " And
though he was a fine man he was nothing to her, for
he was round and could not have stepped out so
soldierly . . . she had no stomach on her but
was slight and broad in the shoulders, and was
handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked
about thirty." And when I asked if she had seen
others like her, she said, " Some of them have their
hair down, but they look quite different, more like
the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those
with their hair up are like this one. The others have
long white dresses, but those with their hair up have

148

short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up
to the calf." And when I questioned her, I found
that they wore what might well be some kind of
buskin. " They are fine and dashing-looking, like
the men one sees riding their horses in twos and
threes on the slopes of the mountains with their
swords swinging. There is no such race living now,
none so finely proportioned . . . When I think
of her and the ladies now they are like little children
running about not knowing how to put their clothes
on right . . . why, I would not call them women
at all."

Not at this time, but some three or four years later,
when the visions came without any conscious use of
symbol for a short time, and with much greater
vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible
beauty, one especially that must always haunt my
memory. Then, too, the Master Pilot told us of
meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession
of women in what seemed the costume of another age.
Were they really people of the past, revisiting, per-
haps, the places where they lived, or must I explain
them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a
mountain garden, by some memory of the race, as
distinct from individual memory? Certainly these
Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed
full of personality; were they not capricious, gener-
ous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did that prove
them more than images and symbols? When I used
a combined earth and fire and lunar symbol, my seer,
a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious Diana and her
dogs, about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging
from her closed eyes, and from the tone of her voice,
that she was in trance, not in reverie, I wished to
lighten the trance a little, and made through careless-

149

ness or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal; and at
once she started and cried out, " She says you are
driving her away too quickly. You have made her
angry." Then, too, if my visions had a subjective
element, so had Mary Battle's, for her fairies had
but one tune, The Distant Waterfall, and she never
heard anything described in a sermon at the Cathedral
that she did not " see it after," and spoke of seeing
in this way the gates of Purgatory.

Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams,
the folk-images could affect mine in turn, for one
night I saw between sleeping and waking a strange
long bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white,
that I found presently in some country tale. How,
too, could one separate the dogs of the country tale
from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In
order to keep myself from nightmare, I had formed
the habit of imagining four watch-dogs, one at each
corner of my room, and, though I had not told him
or anybody, he said, " Here is a very curious thing ;
most nights now, when I lay my head upon the pillow,
I hear a sound of dogs baying — the sound seems to
come up out of the pillow." A friend of Strindberg's,
in delirium tremens, was haunted by mice, and a
friend in the next room heard the squealing of the
mice.

VI

TO that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts
and sciences, which had driven me to conceive a Unity
of Culture defined and evoked by Unity of Image, I
had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the
more troubled because, the first excitement over, I
had done nothing to rouse George Pollexfen from the

150

gloom and hypochondria always thickening about
him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that
the truth I sought would come to me like the subject
of a poem, from some moment of passionate
experience, and that if I filled my exposition with
other men's thought, other men's investigation, I
would sink into all that multiplicity of interest and
opinion. That passionate experience could never
come — of that I was certain — until I had found the
right image or right images. From what but the
image of Apollo, fixed always in memory and passion,
did his priesthood get that occasional power, a classical
historian has described, of lifting great stones and
snapping great branches ; and did not Gemma Galgani,
like many others that had gone before, in 1889 cause
deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating
her crucifix ? In the essay that Wilde read to me one
Christmas Day, occurred these words — " What does
not the world owe to the imitation of Christ, what to
the imitation of Caesar?" and I had seen Macgregor
Mathers paint little pictures combining the forms of
men, animals, and birds, according to a rule which
provided a form for every possible mental condition,
and I had heard him describing, upon what authority
I do not remember, how citizens of ancient Egypt
assumed, when in contemplation, the images of their
gods.

But now image called up image in an endless
procession, and I could not always choose among them
with any confidence; and when I did choose, the
image lost its intensity, or changed into some other
image. I had but exchanged the Temptation of
Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet for that of his St.
Anthony, and I was lost in that region a cabalistic
manuscript, shown me by Macgregor Mathers, had

151

warned me of ; astray upon the Path of the Cameleon,
upon Hodos Camelionis.

VII

NOW that I am a settled man and have many birds—-
the canaries have just hatched out four nestlings — I
have before me the problem that Locke waved aside.
As I gave them an artificial nest, a hollow vessel
like a saucer, they had no need of that skill the wild
bird shows, each species having its own preference
among the lichen, or moss; but they could sort out
wool and hair and a certain soft white down that I
found under a big tree. They would twist a stem of
grass till it was limber, and would wind it all about
the centre of the nest, and when the four grey eggs
were laid, the mother bird knew how to turn them
over from time to time, that they might be warmed
evenly ; and how long she must leave them uncovered,
that the white might not be dried up, and when to
return that the growing bird might not take cold.
Then the young birds, even when they had all their
feathers, were very still as compared with the older
birds, as though any habit of movement would dis-
turb the nest or make them tumble out. One of them
would now and again pass on the food that he had
received from his mother' beak to some other nestling.
The father had often pecked the mother bird before
the eggs were laid, but now, until the last nestling was
decently feathered, he took his share in the feeding,
and was very peaceable, and it was only when the
young could be left to feed themselves that he grew
jealous and had to be put into another cage.

When I watch my child, who is not yet three years

152

old, I can see so many signs of knowledge from be-
yond her own mind ; why else should she be so excited
when a little boy passes outside the window, and take
so little interest in a girl ; why should she put a cloak
about her, and look over her shoulder to see it trail-
ing upon the stairs, as she will some day trail a dress ;
and why, above all, as she lay against her mother's
side, and felt the unborn child moving within, did
she murmur, "Baby, baby?"

When a man writes any work of genius, or invents
some creative action, is it not because some know-
ledge or power has come into his mind from beyond
his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think;
all my birds' adventures started when I hung a little
saucer at one side of the cage, and at the other a
bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be
given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately.

vin

I KNOW now that revelation is from the self, but
from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the
elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the
womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest ; and
that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for
certain moments to our trivial daily mind. There are,
indeed, personifying spirits that we had best call but
Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their
dramatic power they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask
and Image, caring not a straw whether we be Juliet
going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death ; for
in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We
have dreamed a foolish dream these many centuries in

153

thinking that they value a life of contemplation, for
they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it
be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have
but one purpose, to bring their chosen man to the
greatest obstacle he may confront without despair.
They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched
away his Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of
harlots, and sent him to gather cronies at the foot
of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might through
passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn
all to Mask and Image, and so be phantoms in their
own eyes. In great lesser writers like Landor and
like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask
as something set apart ; Andromeda and her Perseus —
though not the sea-dragon — but in a few in whom we
recognise supreme masters of tragedy, the whole con-
test is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such
masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when
they speak through their art, change their luck; yet
they are mirrored in all the suffering of desire. The
two halves of their nature are so completely joined that
they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to
desire whatever happens, being at the 'same instant
predestinate and free, creation's very self. We gaze
at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of
art, but at the re-creation of the man through that
art, the birth of a new species of man, and, it may
even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up, be-
cause that birth, that re-creation, is from terror.
Had not Dante and Villon understood that their fate
wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they lacked
their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species
of optimism, they could but have found a false beauty,
or some momentary instinctive beauty, and suffered
no change at all, or but changed as do the wild

154

creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so
round the clock.

They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for
it is only when the intellect has wrought the whole of
life to drama, to crisis, that we may live for con-
templation, and yet keep our intensity.

And these things are true also of nations, but the
Gate-keepers who drive the nation to war or anarchy
that it may find its Image are different from those
who drive individual men, though I think at times
they work together. And as I look backward upon
my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses
where it seems to me I have found something hard,
cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the
opposite of all that I am in my daily life, and all that
my country is ; yet man or nation can no more make
Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil
into which it is cast.

Hie.

" What portion in the world can the artist have,

Who has awakened from the common dream,

But dissipation and despair?

Hie.

And yet

No one denies to Keats, love of the world.
Remember his deliberate happiness.

Hie.

His art is happy, but who knows his mind?

I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied,

And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant . . .

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

Luxuriant song."

BOOK IV
THE TRAGIC GENERATION

THE TRAGIC GENERATION

TWO or three years after our return to Bedford Park
The Doll9 s House had been played at the Royalty
Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to be
played in England, and somebody had given me a
seat for the gallery. In the middle of the first act,
while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a middle-
aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood
up and said to the little boy at her side, " Tommy,
if you promise to go home straight, we will go now ;"
and at the end of the play, as I wandered through
the entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur,
" A series of conversations terminated by an
accident." I was divided in mind, I hated the play;
what was it but Carolus Durand, Bastien-Lepage,
Huxley and Tyndall, all over again ; I resented being
invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated
speech that music and style were impossible.

" Art is art because it is not nature," I kept re-
peating to myself, but how could I take the same side
with critic and washerwoman? As time passed Ibsen
became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever
young journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill
of abstraction, hated music and style ; and yet neither
I nor my generation could escape him because, though
we and he had not the same friends, we had the same
enemies. I bought his collected works in Mr.

157

158

Archer's translation out of my thirty shillings a week
and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ire-
land and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one
great gift, the most perfect poetical elocution, became
prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a success
in Rosmersholm, where there is symbolism and a stale
odour of spoilt poetry. She and I and half our friends
found ourselves involved in a quarrel with the sup-
porters of old fashioned melodrama, and conventional
romance, and in the support of the new dramatists
who wrote in what the Daily Press chose to consider
the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became manageress
of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr. Todhunter's,
called The Comedy of Sighs, and Mr Bernard Shaw's
Arms and the Man. She asked me to write a one act
play for her niece, Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of
eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in ;
and I, with my Irish Theatre in mind, wrote The
Land of Heart's Desire, in some discomfort when the
child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but
with an abundant mind when Mary Bruin was for I
knew an Irish woman whose unrest troubled me and
lay beyond my comprehension. When she opened
her theatre she had to meet a hostile audience, almost
as violent as that Synge met in January, 1907, and
certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no
hatred for the players, and I think but little for Synge
himself. Nor had she the certainty of final victory
to give her courage, for The Comedy of Sighs was a
rambling story told with a little paradoxical wit. She
had brought the trouble upon herself perhaps, for
always in revolt against her own poetical gift, which
now seemed obsolete, and against her own Demeter-
like face in the mirror, she had tried when interviewed
by the Press to shock and startle — to seem to desire

159

enemies ; and yet, unsure of her own judgment being
out of her own trade, had feared to begin with Shaw's
athletic wit, and now outraged convention saw its
chance. For two hours and a half, pit and gallery
drowned the voices of the players with boos and jeers
that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat
visible to all in his box surrounded by his family, and
to the actress struggling bravely through her weary
part; and then pit and gallery went home to spread
their lying story that the actress had a fit of hysterics
in her dressing-room.

Todhunter had sat on to the end, and there were,
I think, four acts of it, listening to the howling of
his enemies, while his friends slipped out one by one,
till one saw everywhere their empty seats, but nothing
could arouse the fighting instincts of that melancholy
man. Next day I tried to get him to publish his book
of words with satirical designs and illustrations, by
Beardsley, who was just rising into fame, and an in-
troduction attacking the public, but though petulant
and irascible he was incapable of any emotion that
could give life to a cause. He shared the superstition
still current in the theatre, that the public wants sin-
cere drama, but is kept from it by some conspiracy
of managers or newspapers, and could not get out of
his head that the actors were to blame. Shaw, whose
turn came next, had foreseen all months before, and
had planned an opening that would confound his
enemies. For the first few minutes Arms and the
Man is crude melodrama and then just when the
audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into
excellent farce. At the dress rehearsal, a dramatist
who had his own quarrel with the public, was taken
in the noose ; for at the first laugh he stood up, turned
his back on the stage, scowled at the audience, and

160

even when everybody else knew what turn the play
had taken, continued to scowl, and order those
nearest to be silent.

On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except
certain members of the Fabian Society, started to
laugh at the author and then, discovering that they
themselves were being laughed at, sat there not con-
verted— their hatred was too bitter for that — but
dumbfounded, while the rest of the house cheered and
laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after
the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his
courage and boo loudly. " I assure the gentleman
in the gallery," was Shaw's answer, " that he and
I are of exactly the same opinion, but what can
we do against a whole house who are of the contrary
opinion?" And from that moment Bernard Shaw
became the most formidable man in modern letters,
and even the most drunken of medical students knew
it. My own play, which had been played with The
Comedy of Sighs, had roused no passions, but had
pleased a sufficient minority for Florence Farr to keep
it upon the stage with Arms and the Man, and I was
in the theatre almost every night for some weeks.
"Oh, yes, the people seem to like Arms and the Man,"
said one of Mr Shaw's players to me, " but we have
just found out that we are all wrong. Mr Shaw did
really mean it quite seriously, for he has written a
letter to say so, and we must not play for laughs any
more." Another night I found the manager,
triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the
Duke of Edinburgh had been there, and the Duke of
Edinburgh had spoken his dislike out loud so that the
whole stalls could hear, but the Prince of Wales had
been " very pleasant " and " got the Duke of Edin-
burgh away as soon as possible." "They asked for

161

me," he went on, " and the Duke of Edinburgh kept
on repeating, ' The man is mad,' meaning Mr Shaw,
and the Prince of Wales asked who Mr Shaw was,
and what he meant by it." I myself was almost as
bewildered for though I came mainly to see how my
own play went, and for the first fortnight to vex my
most patient actors with new lines, I listened with
excitement to see how the audience would like certain
passages of Arms and the Man. I hated it ; it seemed
to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the
crooked road of life and I stood aghast before its
energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by
Mr. Epstein or of some design by Mr Wyndham
Lewis. He was right to claim Samuel Butler for his
master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make
the discoverey, that it is possible to write with great
effect without music, without style, either good or
bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional im-
plication and to prefer plain water to every vintage,
so much metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of
the vine. Presently I had a nightmare that I was
haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone,
but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled,
smiled perpetually. Yet I delighted in Shaw
the formidable man. He could hit my enemies and
the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as
no living author that was dear to me could ever hit.
Florence Farr's way home was mine also for a part
of the way, and it was often of this that we talked,
and sometimes, though not always, she would share
my hesitations, and for years to come I was to wonder
whenever Shaw became my topic, whether the cock
crowed for my blame or for my praise.

162

II

SHAW and Wilde, had no catastrophe come, would
have long divided the stage between them, though
they were most unlike — for Wilde believed himself
to value nothing but words in their emotional associa-
tions, and he had turned his style to a parade as
though it were his show, and he Lord Mayor.

I was at Sligo again and I saw the announcement
of his action against Lord Queensberry, when starting
from my uncle's house to walk to Knocknarea to dine
with Cochrane of the Glen, as he was called, to dis-
tinguish him from others of that name, an able old
man. He had a relation, a poor mad girl, who shared
our meals, and at whom I shuddered. She would
take a flower from the vase in front of her and push
it along the tablecloth towards any male guest who
sat near. The old man himself had strange opinions,
born not from any mental eccentricity, but from the
solitude of his life; and a freedom from all prejudice
that was not of his own discovery. " The world is
getting more manly," he would say, " it has begun
to drink port again," or " Ireland is going to become
prosperous. Divorced couples now choose Ireland for
a retreat, just as before Scotland became prosperous
they began to go there. There are a divorced wife
and her lover living at the other side of the mountain."
I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde's kind-
ness to myself, said I did not believe him guilty,
quoted the psychologist Bain, who has attributed to
every sensualist " a voluminous tenderness," and
described Wilde's hard brilliance, his dominating self-
possession. I considered him essentially a man of
action, that he was a writer by perversity and accident,
and would have been more important as soldier or

163

politician ; and I was certain that, guilty or not guilty,
he would prove himself a man. I was probably
excited, and did most of the talking, for if Cochrane
had talked, I would have remembered an amusing
sentence or two ; but he was certainly sympathetic. A
couple of days later I received a letter from Lionel
Johnson, denouncing Wilde with great bitterness. He
had "a cold scientific intellect;" he got a "sense
of triumph and power; at every dinner-table he
dominated, from the knowledge that he was guilty of
that sin which, more than any other possible to man,
would turn all those people against him if they but
knew." He wrote in the mood of his poem, To the De-
stroyer of a Soul, addressed to Wilde, as I have always
believed, though I know nothing of the circumstance
that made him write it.

I might have known that Wilde's phantasy had
taken some tragic turn, and that he was meditating
upon possible disaster, but one took all his words for
play — had he not called insincerity " a mere multipli-
cation of the personality" or some such words? I
had met a man who had found him in a barber's shop
in Venice, and heard him explain, " I am having my
hair curled that I may resemble Nero;" and when,
as editor of an Irish anthology, I had asked leave
to quote " Tread gently, she is near under the snow,"
he had written that I might do so if I pleased, but
his most characteristic poem was that sonnet with the
lines

"Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey's romance —
And must I lose a soul's inheritance."

When in London f or^ my play I had asked news
from an actor who had seen him constantly. " He is
in deep melancholy," was the answer. " He says that

164

he tries to sleep away as much of life as possible,
only leaving his bed at two or three in the afternoon,
and spending the rest of the day at the Cafe Royal.
He has written what he calls the best short story in
the world, and will have it that he repeats to himself
on getting out of bed and before every meal. ' Christ
came from a white plain to a purple city, and as he
passed through the first street, he heard voices over-
head, and saw a young man lying drunk upon a
window sill, " Why do you waste your soul in
drunkenness?" He said. "Lord, I was a leper and
You healed me, what else can I do ? " A little further
through the town he saw a young man following a
harlot, and said, " Why do you dissolve your soul in
debauchery?" and the young man answered, "Lord,
I was blind, and You healed me, what else can I do?"
At last in the middle of the city He saw an old man
crouching, weeping upon the ground, and when He
asked why he wept, the old man answered, " Lord, I
was dead and You raised me into life, what else can
I do but weep?"'"

Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled
it with the verbal decoration of his epoch, and I have
to repeat it to myself as I first heard it, before I can
see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt its sincerity
than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late
rising, and sleeping away his life, that elaborate
playing with tragedy, was an attempt to escape from
an emotion by its exaggeration. He had three suc-
cessful plays running at once; he had been almost
poor, and now, his head full of Flaubert, found him-
self with ten thousand a year : — " Lord, I was dead,
and You raised me into life, what else can I do but
weep." A comedian, he was in the hands of those
dramatists who understand nothing but tragedy.

165

A few days after the first production of my Land
of Heart's Desire, I had my last conversation with
him. He had come into the theatre as the curtain
fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to ask my
pardon that he overwhelmed me with compliments;
and yet I wonder if he would have chosen those
precise compliments, or spoken so extravagantly, but
for the turn his thoughts had taken : " Your story
in The National Observer, The Crucifixion of the
Outcast, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful."

Some business or other brought me to London
once more and I asked various Irish writers for
letters of sympathy, and I was refused by none but
Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered an
irrelevant excuse — his dislike for everything that
Wilde had written. I heard that Wilde was at his
mother's house in Oakley Street, and I called there,
but the Irish servant told me, her face drawn and
tragic as in the presence of death, that he was not
there, but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde
received me with, "Who are you; what do you
want?" but became all friendship when I told him
that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took the
bundle of letters in his hand, but said, " Do these
letters urge him to run away? Every friend he has
is urging him to, but we have made up our minds
that he must stay and take his chance." "No," I
said, " I certainly do not think that he should run
away, nor do those letters advise it." " Letters
from Ireland," he said. "Thank you, thank you.
He will be glad to get those letters, but I would keep
them from him if they advised him to run away."
Then he threw himself back in his chair and began to
talk with incoherent emotion, and in phrases that
echoed now and again his brother's style at its worst ;

166

there were tear in his eyes, and he was, I think, slightly
intoxicated. " He could escape, oh, yes, he could
escape — there is a yacht in the Thames, and five
thousand pounds to pay his bail — well, not exactly in
the Thames, but there is a yacht — oh, yes, he could
escape, even if I had to inflate a balloon in the back
yard with my own hand, but he has resolved to stay,
to face it out, to stand the music like Christ. You
must have heard — it is not necessary to go into detail
— but he and I, we have not been friends; but he
came to me like a wounded stag, and I took him in."
" After his release " — after the failure of his action
against Lord Queensberry, I think — " Stewart Head-
lam engaged a room at an hotel and brought him
there under another name, but the manager came up
and said, 'Are you Mr. Wilde?' You know what
my brother is, you know how he would answer that.
He said, ' Yes, I am Oscar Wilde,' and the manager
said he must not stay. The same thing happened in
hotel after hotel, and at last he made up his mind to
come here. It is his vanity that has brought all this
disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him."
He dwelt upon the rhythm of the words as his brother
would have done — " They swung it before his heart."
His first emotion at the thought of the letters over,
he became more simple, and explained that his
brother considered that his crime was not the vice
itself, but that he should have brought such misery
upon his wife and children, and that he was bound
to accept any chance, however slight, that might re-
establish his position. " If he is acquitted," he said,
" he will stay out of England for a few years, and can
then gather his friends about him once more — even if
he is condemned he will purge his offence — but if he
runs away he will lose every friend that he has." I

167

heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady
Wilde had said, " If you stay, even if you go to
prison, you will always be my son, it will make no
difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never
speak to you again." While I was there, some
woman who had just seen him — Willie Wilde's wife,
I think — came in, and threw herself in a chair, and
said in an exhausted voice, "It is all right now, he
has made up his mind to go to prison if necessary."
Before his release, two years later, his brother and
mother were dead, and a little later his wife, struck
by paralysis during his imprisonment, I think, was
dead, too ; and he himself, his constitution ruined by
prison life, followed quickly; but I have never
doubted, even for an instant, that he made the
right decision, and that he owes to that decision half
of his renown.

Cultivated London, that before the action against
Lord Queensberry had mocked his pose and affected
style, and refused to acknowledge his wit, was now
full of his advocates, though I did not meet a single
man who considered him innocent. One old enemy of
his overtook me in the street and began to praise his
audacity, his self-possession. " He has made," he
said, "of infamy a new Thermopylae." I had written
in reply to Lionel Johnson's letter that I regretted
Wilde's downfall but not that of his imitators, but
Johnson had changed with the rest. " Why
do you not regret the fall of Wilde's imitators " —
I had but tried to share what I thought his opinion —
" They were worthless, but should have been left to
criticism." Wilde himself was a martyr in his eyes,
and when I said that tragedy might give his art
a greater depth, he would not even grant a martyr's
enemies that poor merit, and thought Wilde would

168

produce, when it was all over, some comedy exactly
like the others, writing from an art where events
could leave no trace. Everywhere one met writers
and artists who praised his wit and eloquence in the
witness box, or repeated some private saying. Willie
Redmond told of finding him, to his astonishment,
at the conversazione of some theatrical society, stand-
ing amid an infuriated crowd, mocking with more
than all his old satirical wit the actors and their
country. He had said to a well-known painter during
one or other of the trials, " My poor brother writes
to me that he is defending me all over London; my
poor, dear brother, he could compromise a steam
engine." His brother, too, had suffered a change,
for, if rumour did not wrong him, " the wounded
stag " had not been at all graciously received.
" Thank God my vices were decent," had been his
comment, and refusing to sit at the same table, he
had dined at some neighbouring hotel at his brother's
expense. His successful brother who had scorned him
for a drunken ne'er-do-well was now at his mercy,
and besides, he probably shared, until tragedy awoke
another self, the rage and contempt that filled the
crowds in the street, and all men and women who had
an over-abundant normal sexual instinct. " Wilde
will never lift his head again," said the art critic,
Gleeson White, " for he has against him all men of
infamous life." When the verdict was announced
the harlots in the street outside danced upon the
pavement.

Ill

SOMEWHERE about 1450, though later in some
parts of Europe by a hundred years or so, and in

some earlier, men attained to personality in great
numbers, " Unity of Being," and became like a
" perfectly proportioned human body," and as men
so fashioned held places of power, their nations had
it too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought
and feeling. What afterwards showed for rifts and
cracks were there already, but imperious impulse held
all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding
of the poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time
personality seemed but the stronger for it. Shakes-
speare's people make all things serve their passion,
and that passion is for the moment the whole energy
of their being — birds, beasts, men, women, landscape,
society, are but symbols and metaphors, nothing is
studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface,
depth only. The men that Titian painted, the men
that Jongsen painted, even the men of Van Dyck,
seemed at moments like great hawks at rest. In the
Dublin National Gallery there hung, perhaps there
still hangs, upon the same wall, a portrait of some
Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr. Sargent's
painting of President Wilson. Whatever thought
broods in the dark eyes of that Venetian gentleman,
has drawn its life from his whole body ; it feeds upon
it as the flame feeds upon the candle — and should that
thought be changed, his pose would change, his very
cloak would rustle for his whole body thinks.
President Wilson lives only in the eyes, which are
steady and intent ; the flesh about the mouth is dead,
and the hands are dead, and the clothes suggest no
movement of his body, nor any movement but that of
the valet, who has brushed and folded in mechanical
routine. There, all was ^ an energy flowing outward
from the nature itself; here, all is the anxious study
and slight deflection of external force; there man's

170

mind and body were predominantly subjective; here
all is objective, using those words not as philosophy
uses them, but as we use them in conversation.

The bright part of the moon's disk, to adopt the
symbolism of a certain poem, is subjective mind, and
the dark, objective mind, and we have eight and
twenty Phases for our classification of mankind, and
of the movement of his thought. At the first Phase
— the night where there is no moonlight — all is
objective, while when, upon the fifteenth night, the
moon comes to the full, there is only subjective mind.
The mid-renaissance could but approximate to the
full moon " For there is no human life at the full or
the dark," but we may attribute to the next three
nights of the moon the men of Shakespeare, of
Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and watch them
grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent,
as the nights pass; and it is well to find before the
fourth — the nineteenth moon counting from the start
— a sudden change, as when a cloud becomes rain, or
water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden;
popular, typical men have grown more ugly and more
argumentative ; the face that Van Dyck called a fatal
face has faded before Cromwell's warty opinionated
head. Henceforth no mind made like " a perfectly
proportioned human body " shall sway the public, for
great men must live in a portion of themselves, be-
come professional and abstract; but seeing that the
moon's third quarter is scarce passed, that abstrac-
tion has attained but not passed its climax, that a half,
as I affirm it, of the twenty-second night still lingers,
they may subdue and conquer ; cherish, even, some
Utopian dream ; spread abstraction ever further till
thought is but a film, and there is no dark depth any
more, surface only. But men who belong by nature

171

to the nights near to the full are still born, a tragic
minority, and how shall they do their work when too
ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of the
nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his
work. He understood his weakness, true personality
was impossible, for that is born in solitude, and at
his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself
before the eyes of others, and, having great ambition,
before some great crowd of eyes; but there is no
longer any great crowd that cares for his true thought.
He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out
stage situations, for he knows that he may be as
romantic as he please, so long as he does not believe
in his romance, and all that he may get their ears for
a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which he does
believe.

We Rhymers did not humour and cajole ; but it was
not wholly from demerit, it was in part because of
different merit, that he refused our exile. Shaw, as
I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time,
its moon and his almost exactly coincide. He is
quite content to exchange Narcissus and his Pool for
the signal box at a railway junction, where goods and
travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glitter-
ing road. Wilde was a monarchist, though content
that monarchy should turn demagogue for its own
safety, and he held a theatre by the means whereby
he held a London dinner table. " He who can
dominate a London dinner table," he had boasted,
" can dominate the world." While Shaw has but
carried his street-corner socialist eloquence on to the
stage, and in him one discovers, in his writing and his
public speech, as once — before their outline had been
softened by prosperity or the passage of the years — in
his clothes and in his stiff joints, the civilization that

172

Sargent's picture has explored. Neither his crowd
nor he have yet made that discovery that brought
President Wilson so near his death, that the moon
draws to its fourth quarter. But what happens to
the individual man whose moon has come to that
fourth quarter, and what to the civilization. . . ?

I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I
<;an half hear beyond it in the memory a weightier
music, but this much at any rate is certain — the
dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation
can return to Unity of Culture, is false; though it
may be we can achieve it for some small circle of men
and women, and there leave it till the moon bring
round its century.

" The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place ;
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that her pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
Her changing eyes."

178
IV

HENLEY'S troubles and infirmities were growing
upon him. He, too, an ambitious, formidable man,
who showed alike in his practice and in his theory,
in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor, for
instance, that he never understood how small a frag-
ment of our own nature can be brought to perfect ex-
pression, nor that even but with great toil, in a much
divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our own
Phase be right, a fragment may be an image of the
whole, the moon's still scarce crumbled image, as it
were, in a glass of wine. He would be, and have all
poets be, a true epitome of the whole mass, a Herrick
and Dr. Johnson in the same body and because this
— not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its door
— is no longer possible, his work lacks music, is
abstract, as even an actor's movement can be when
the thought of doing is plainer to his mind than the
doing itself : the straight line from cup to lip, let
us say, more plain than the hand's own sensation
weighed down by that heavy spillable cup. I think
he was content, when he had called before our eyes —
before the too understanding eyes of his chosen
crowd — the violent burly man that he had dreamed*
content with the mere suggestion, and so did not
work long enough at his verses. He disliked Victor
Hugo as much as he did Rossetti, and yet Rossetti 's
translation from Les Burgraves, because of its mere
technical mastery, out-sings Henley in his own song —

" My mother is dead ; God's patience wears ;
It seems my Chaplain will not have done.

Love on : who cares ?

Who cares? Love on."

174

I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it
for some glimpse of what he might have been as
Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of what he actually
was, not as poet but as man. He had what Wilde
lacked, even in his ruin, passion, was maybe as
passionate as some great man of action, as Parnell,
let us say. When he and Stevenson quarrelled, he
cried over it with some woman or other, and his
notorious article was but for vengeance upon Mrs.
Stevenson, who had arranged for the public eye, what
he considered an imaginary figure, with no resemblance
to the gay companion who had founded his life, to
that life's injury, upon " The august, the immortal
musketeers." She had caused the quarrel, as he
believed, and now she had robbed him over again, by
blotting from the world's memory the friend of his
youth ; and because he believed it I read those angry
paragraphs with but deeper sympathy for the
writer; and I think that the man who has left them
out of Henley's collected writings has wronged his
memory, as Mrs. Stevenson wronged the memory of
Stevenson.

He was no contemplative man, no pleased
possessor of wooden models and paper patterns, but
a great passionate man, and no friend of his would
have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him in
later years, but I doubt if he was ever the same after
the death of his six-year old daughter. Few passages
of his verse touch me as do those few mentions of her
though they lack precision of word and sound. When
she is but a hope, he prays that she may have his
* gift of life ' and his wife's ' gift of love,' and when
she is but a few months old he murmurs over her
sleep —

175

When you wake in your crib,

You an inch of experience —

Vaulted about

With the wonder of darkness ;

Wailing and striving

To reach from your feebleness

Something you feel

Will be good to and cherish you.

And now he commends some friend " boyish and
kind, and shy," who greeted him, and greeted his wife,
" that day we brought our beautiful one to lie in
the green peace " and who is now dead himself, and
after that he speaks of love " turned by death to
longing " and so, to an enemy.

When I spoke to him of his child's death he said,
" she was a person of genius ; she had the genius
of the mind, and the genius of the body." And later
I heard him talk of her as a man talks of something
he cannot keep silence over because it is in all his
thoughts. I can remember, too, his talking of some
book of natural history he had read, that he might
be able to answer her questions.

He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames
with a great ivy tod shadowing door and window,
and one night there he shocked and startled a room-
ful of men by showing how far he could be swept
beyond our reach in reveries of affection. The dull
man, who had tried to put Wilde out of countenance,
suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot
remember what incautious remark of mine made to
some man at my side : " Yeats believes in magic ;
what nonsense." Henley said, " No, it may not be
nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now."
And then turning towards me with a changed sound in
his voice, "It is just a game, isn't it." I replied,
not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing

176

to avoid discussion in the dull man's company, " One
has had a vision; one wants to have another, that
is all." Then Henley said, speaking in a very low
voice, " I want to know how I am to get to my
daughter. I was sitting here the other night when
she came into the room and played round the table
and went out again. Then I saw that the door was
shut and I knew that I had seen a vision." There
was an embarrassed silence, and then somebody spoke
of something else and we began to discuss it hurriedly
and eagerly.

I CAME now to be more in London, never missing
the meetings of the Rhymers' Club, nor those of the
council of the Irish Literary Society, where I con-
stantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed upon
the unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new move-
ment. The Irish members of Parliament looked upon
us with some hostility because we had made it a matter
of principle never to put a politician in the chair, and
upon other grounds. One day, some old Irish member
of Parliament made perhaps his only appearance at a
gathering of members. He recited with great emotion
a ballad of his own composition in the manner of
Young Ireland, repeating over his sacred names,
Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning
that new poets and new movements should have taken
something of their sacredness away. The ballad had
no literary merit, but I went home with a troubled
conscience ; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began
to see the result of our work in a deepened perception
of all those things that strengthen race, that trouble

177

remained. I had in mind that old politician as I wrote
but the other day —

" Our part

To murmur name upon name

As a mother names her child."

The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy,
though we did not know that till the play had
finished. I have never found a full explanation of that
tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that, unlike
the Victorian poets, almost all were poor men, and had
made it a matter of conscience to turn from every
kind of money-making that prevented good writing,
and that poverty meant strain, and for the most part,
a refusal of domestic life. Then I have remembered
that Johnson had private means, and that others who
came to tragic ends, had wives and families. Another
day I think that perhaps our form of lyric, our
insistence upon emotion which has no relation to any
public interest, gathered together, overwrought,
unstable men; and remember the moment after that
the first to go out of his mind had no lyrical gift,
and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a
witty man of the world ; and that a little later another
who seemed, alike as man and writer, dull and form-
less, went out of his mind, first burning poems which
I cannot believe would have proved him as the one
man who saw them claims, a man of genius. The
meetings were always decorous and often dull; some
one would read out a poem and we would comment, too
politely for the criticism to have great value ; and yet
that we read out our poems, and thought that they
could be so tested, was a definition of our aims.
Love's Nocturne is one of the most beautiful poems
in the world, but no one can find out its beauty, so
intricate its thought and metaphor, till he has read

M

178

it over several times, or often stopped his reading to
think out the meaning of some passage, and the
Faustine of Swinburne, where many separate verses are
powerful and musical, could not, were it read out, be
understood with pleasure, however clearly it were
read, because it has no more logical structure than a
bag of shot. I shall, however, remember all my life
that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke
aloud in his musical monotone, where meaning and
cadence found the most precise elocution, his poem
suggested " by the Statue of King Charles at Charing
Cross." It was as though I listened to a great speech.
Nor will that poem be to me again what it was that
first night. For long I only knew Dowson's O Mors,
to quote but the first words of its long title, and his
Villanelle of Sunset from his reading, and it was
because of the desire to hold them in my hand that
I suggested the first Book of The Rhymers9 Club.
They were not speech but perfect song, though song
for the speaking voice. It was perhaps our delight in
poetry that was, before all else, speech or song, and
could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a
good play or good conversation, that made Francis
Thompson, whom we admired so much — before the
publication of his first poem I had brought to the
Cheshire Cheese the proof sheets of his Ode to the
Setting Sun9 his first published poem — come but once
and refuse to contribute to our book. Preoccupied
with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that
which we renounced, and thought what seemed to us
simplicity, mere emptiness. To some members this
simplicity was perhaps created by their tumultuous
lives, they praised a desired woman and hoped that she
would find amid their praise her very self, or at worst,
their very passion ; and knew that she, ignoramus that

179

she was, would have slept in the middle of Love9 8
Nocturne, lofty and tender though it be. Woman
herself was still in our eyes, for all that, romantic and
mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine, our
emotions remembering the Lilith and the Sybilla
Palmifera of Rossetti ; for as yet that sense of comedy,
which was soon to mould the very fashion plates, and,
in the eyes of men of my generation, to destroy at
last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to
show here and there, in slight subordinate touches
among the designs of great painters and craftsmen.
It could not be otherwise, for Johnson's favourite
phrase, that life is ritual, expressed something that
was in some degree in all our thoughts, and how could
life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical place?
If Rossetti was a sub-conscious influence, and
perhaps the most powerful of all, we looked
consciously to Pater for our philosophy. Three or
four years ago I re-read Marius the Epicurean, ex-
pecting to find I cared for it no longer, but it still
seemed to me, as I think it seemed to us all, the only
great prose in modern English, and yet I began to
wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was
the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster
of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope,
tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left
to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.
Pater had made us learned; and, whatever we might
be elsewhere, ceremonious and polite, and distant in
our relations to one another, and I think none knew
as yet that Dowson, who seemed to drink so little and
had so much dignity and reserve, was breaking his
heart for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian
eating house, in dissipation and drink; and that he
might that very night sleep upon a sixpenny bed in

180

a doss house. It seems to me that even yet, and I am
speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one
another, but the poems that we read and criticised;
perhaps I have forgotten or was too much in Ireland
for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we shared
nothing but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson
and Symons would visit our sage at Oxford, and I
remember Johnson, whose reports however were not
always to be trusted, returning with a sentence that
long ran in my head. He had noticed books on
political economy among Pater's books, and Pater
had said, " Everything that has occupied man, for
any length of time, is worthy of our study." Perhaps
it was because of Pater's influence that we, with an
affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of
literature for our authority, instead of finding it like
the young men in the age of comedy that followed us,
in some new, and so still unref uted authority ; that
we preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to
the still unspotted foam; that we were traditional
alike in our dress, in our manner, in our opinions, and
in our style.

Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low
voices, as though they feared to disturb the readers
in some ancient library, and timidly as though they
knew that all subjects had long since been explored,
all questions long since decided in books whereon the
dust settled — live lives of such disorder and seek to
rediscover in verse the syntax of impulsive common
life ? Was it that we lived in what is called " an age
of transition " and so lacked coherence, or did we
but pursue antithesis?

181

VI

ALL things, apart from love and melancholy, were
a study to us ; Home already learned in Botticelli had
begun to boast that when he wrote of him
there would be no literature, all would be but learn-
ing ; Symons, as I wrote when I first met him, studied
the music halls, as he might have studied the age of
Chaucer; while I gave much time to what is called
the Christian Cabala; nor was there any branch of
knowledge Johnson did not claim for his own. When
I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at the
Charlotte Street house, I had called about five in the
afternoon, but the man servant that he shared with
Home and Image, told me that he was not yet up,
adding with effusion "he is always up for dinner at
seven." This habit of breakfasting when others
dined had been started by insomnia, but he came to
defend it for its own sake. When I asked if it did
not separate him from men and women he replied,
" In my library I have all the knowledge of the world
that I need." He had certainly a considerable library,
far larger than that of any young man of my
acquaintance, so large that he wondered if it might
not be possible to find some way of hanging new
shelves from the ceiling like chandeliers. That
room was always a pleasure to me, with its curtains of
grey corduroy over door and window and book case,
and its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion
invented, I think, by Home, that was soon to spread.
There was a portrait of Cardinal Newman, looking a
little like Johnson himself, some religious picture by
Simeon Solomon, and works upon theology in Greek
and Latin and a general air of neatness and severity ;

182

and talking there by candle light it never seemed very
difficult to murmur Villiers de L'isle Adam's proud
words, " As for living — our servants will do that for
us." Yet I can now see that Johnson himself in some
hidden, half-conscious part of him desired the world
he had renounced, desired it as an object of study.
I was often puzzled as to when and where he could
have met the famous men or beautiful women, whose
conversation, often wise, and always appropriate, he
quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his
death that I discovered that these conversations were
imaginary. He never altered a detail of speech, and
would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or
Newman for years without amplification or amend-
ment, with what seemed a scholar's accuracy. His
favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I
believe, he had never met, though I can remember
nothing now but Newman's greeting to Johnson, " I
have always considered the profession of a man of
letters a third order of the priesthood!" and these
quotations became so well known that at Newman's
death, the editor of The Nineteenth Century
asked them for publication. Because of his delight in
all that was formal and arranged he objected to the
public quotation of private conversation even after
death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps
this dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life,
yet before that life began he wrote from Oxford to
his Tory but flattered family, that as he stood
mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking
a book from a shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the
open door on his way upstairs to some college author-
ity, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and
there spent an hour of talk. Presently it was dis-
covered that Gladstone had not been near Oxford on

183

the date given ; yet he quoted that conversation with-
out variation of a word until the end of his life, and
I think believed in it as firmly as did his friends.
These conversations were always admirable in their
drama, but never too dramatic or even too polished to
lose their casual accidental character; they were the
phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life
found its expression. If he made his knowledge of
the world out of his phantasy, his knowledge of
tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet
was that knowlege as great as he would have us
believe? Did he really know Welsh, for instance,
had he really as he told me, made his only love song,
his incomparable Morfydd out of three lines in Welsh,
heard sung by a woman at her door on a walking tour
in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he shared
in their emotion?

"0, what are the winds?
And what are the waters?
Mine are your eyes."

He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry
with its Latin weight, his religion with its constant
reference to the Fathers of the Church, or to the
philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy
were a study and achievement of the intellect.
Arthur Symons' poetry made him angry, because it
would substitute for that achievement, Parisian im-
pressionism, " a London fog, the blurred tawny lamp-
light, the red omnibus, the dreary rain, the depressing
mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering
women, three dexterous stanzas telling you that and
nothing more." I, on the other hand, angered him
by talking as if art existed for emotion only, and for
refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean

184

Trilogy, the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet
at moments the thought came to him that intellect, as
he conceived it, was too much a thing of many books,
that it lacked lively experience. " Yeats," he has
said to me, " You need ten years in a library, but I
have need of ten years in the wilderness." When he
said " Wilderness " I am certain, however, that he
thought of some historical, some bookish desert, the
Thebaid, or the lands about the Mareotic sea. His
best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he spoke
little of it, but much about his prose, and would con-
tend that I had no right to consider words made to
read, less natural than words made to be spoken;
and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas
Hardy, that kept its vitality, as he contended, though
two pages long. He punctuated after the manner of
the seventeenth century and was always ready to spend
an hour discussing the exact use of the colon. " One
should use a colon where other people use a semi-colon,
a semi-colon where other people use a comma," was,
I think, but a condescension to my ignorance for the
matter was plainly beset with many subtleties.

VII

NOT till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever
drink too much for his sobriety — though what he
drank would certainly be too much for that of most
of the men whom I knew — I no more doubted his
self-control, though we were very intimate friends,
than I doubted his memories of Cardinal Newman.
The discovery that he did was a great shock to me,
and, I think, altered my general view of the world-

185

I had, by my friendship with O'Leary, by my fight
against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group
of men, who at that time controlled what remained
of the old Fenian movement in England and Scotland ;
and at a moment when an attempt, that came to
nothing, was being made to combine once more our
constitutional and unconstitutional politics, I had
been asked to represent them at some convention in
the United States. I went to consult Johnson, whom
I found sitting at a table with books about him. I
was greatly tempted, because I was promised complete
freedom of speech ; and I was at the time enraged
by some wild articles published by some Irish
American newspaper, suggesting the burning down of
the houses of Irish landlords. Nine years later I was
lecturing in America, and a charming old Irishman
came to see me with an interview to write, and we
spent, and as I think in entire neglect of his inter-
view, one of the happiest hours I have ever spent,
comparing our tales of the Irish fairies, in which he
very firmly believed. When he had gone I looked at
his card, to discover that he was the writer of that
criminal incitement. I told Johnson that if I had a
week to decide in I would probably decide to go, but
as they had only given me three days, I had refused.
He would not hear of my refusal with so much await-
ing my condemnation; and that condemnation would
be effective with Catholics, for he would find me pas-
sages in the Fathers, condemning every kind of politi-
cal crime, that of the dynamiter and the incendiary
especially. I asked how could the Fathers have con-
demned weapons they had never heard of, but those
weapons, he contended, wore merely developments of
old methods and weapons; they had decided all in
principle; but I need not trouble myself about the

186

matter, for he would put into my hands before I sailed
the typewritten statement of their doctrine, dealing
with the present situation in the utmost detail. He
seemed perfectly logical, but a little more confident
and impassioned than usual, and I had, I think,
promised to accept — when he rose from his chair, took
a step towards me in his eagerness, and fell on to the
floor; and I saw that he was drunk. From that on,
he began to lose control of his life; he shifted from
Charlotte Street, where, I think, there was fear that
he would overset lamp or candle and burn the house,
to Gray's Inn, and from Gray's Inn to old rambling
rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and at last one called to
find his outer door shut, the milk on the door-
step sour. Sometimes I would urge him to put him-
self, as Jack Nettleship had done, into an Institute.
One day when I had been very urgent, he spoke of " a
craving that made every atom of his body cry out "
and said the moment after, " I do not want to be
cured," and a moment after that, " In ten years I
shall be penniless and shabby, and borrow half-crowns
from friends." He seemed to contemplate a vision
that gave him pleasure, and now that I look back, I
remember that he once said to me that Wilde got,
perhaps, an increase of pleasure and excitement from
the degradation of that group of beggars and black-
mailers where he sought his pathics, and I remember,
too, his smile at my surprise, as though he spoke of
psychological depths I could never enter. Did the
austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that
spiritual ecstasy which he touched at times, heighten,
as complementary colours heighten one another, not
only the Vision of Evil, but its fascination? Was it
only Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of
evil, when shown in its horror, and, as it were, judged

187

and lost; and what proud man does not feel tempta-
tion strengthened from the certainty that his intellect
is not deceived?

VIII

I BEGAN now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I
knew only at the Rhymers, or through some
chance meeting at Johnson's. I was indolent and
procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him
to dine, or taking some other step towards better
knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at Dieppe.
He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the
autopsy after his death, was discovered never to have
grown, except in the brain, after his fifteenth year, he
was full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were close
friends, and Johnson lectured him out of the Fathers
upon chastity, and boasted of the great good done
him thereby. But the rest of us counted the glasses
emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some
detail of the restaurant-keeper's daughter, and of
her marriage to the waiter, and of that weekly game
of cards with her that filled so great a share of Dow-
son's emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other
woman, it was said, but, drunk, would desire whatever
woman chance brought, clean or dirty.

Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect,
and always, I think, deliberately picked his company,
but Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate, drifting. His
poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of
religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic
outline, being but a desire for a condition of virginal
ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur Symons, his very
close friend, has written, that he loved the restaurant-
keeper's daughter for her youth, one may be almost

188

certain that he sought from religion some similar
quality, something of that which the angels find who
move perpetually, as Swedenborg has said, towards
" the dayspring of their youth." Johnson's poetry,
like Johnson himself before his last decay, conveys an
emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of hard
energy; he gave us of his triumph; while Dowson 's
poetry is sad, as he himself seemed, and pictures his
life of temptation and defeat,

" Unto us they belong
Us the bitter and gay,
Wine and women and song."

Their way of looking at their intoxication showed their
characters. Johnson, who could not have written
Dark Angel if he did not suffer from remorse, showed
to his friends an impenitent face, and defeated me
when I tried to prevent the foundation of an Irish
convivial club — it was brought to an end after one
meeting by the indignation of the members' wives —
whereas the last time I saw Dowson he was pouring
out a glass of whiskey for himself in an empty corner
t>f my room and murmuring over and over in what
seemed automatic apology " The first to-day."

IX

TWO men are always at my side, Lionel Johnson
and John Synge whom I was to meet a little later;
but Johnson is to me the more vivid in memory,
possibly because of the external finish, the clearly-
marked lineaments of his body, which seemed but to
express the clarity of his mind. I think Dowson 's
best verse immortal, bound, that is, to outlive

189

famous novels and plays and learned histories and
other discursive things, but he was too vague and
gentle for my affections. I understood him too well,
for I had been like him but for the appetite that made
me search out strong condiments. Though I cannot
explain what brought others of my generation to such
misfortune, I think that (falling backward upon my
parable of the moon) I can explain some part of
Dowson's and Johnson's dissipation —

" What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awaked from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?"

When Edmund Spencer described the islands of
Phaedria and of Acrasia he aroused the indignation
of Lord Burleigh, " that rugged forehead " and
Lord Burleigh was in the right if morality were our
only object.

In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain
forms of sensuous loveliness were separated from all
the general purposes of life, as they had not been
hitherto in European literature — and would not be
again, for even the historical process has its ebb and
flow, till Keats wrote his Endymion. I think that the
movement of our thought has more and more so separ-
ated certain images and regions of the mind, and that
these images grow in beauty as they grow in sterility.
Shakespeare leaned, as it were, even as craftsman,
upon the general fate of men and nations, had about
him the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets,
including Spencer in all but a few pages, until our
age came, and when it came almost all, have had
some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give com-
panionship with their fellows. Had not Matthew
Arnold his faith in what he described as the best

190

thought of his generation? Browning his psycho-
logical curiosity, Tennyson, as before him Shelley
and Wordsworth, moral values that were not aesthetic
values? But Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner, and
Kubla Khan, and Rossetti in all his writings made
what Arnold has called that " morbid effort," that
search for " perfection of thought and feeling, and
to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new,
pure beauty, and suffered in their lives because of it.
The typical men of the classical age (I think of Corn-
modus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and
his caprice), lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of
appetite, and so found in Christianity, with its
Ihebaid and its Mariotic Sea the needed curb. But
what can the Christian confessor say to those who
more and more must make all out of the privacy of
their thought, calling up perpetual images of desire,
for he cannot say " Cease to be artist, cease to be
poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor
can he bid men leave the world, who suffer from the
terrors that pass before shut-eyes. Coleridge, and
Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade
him that he was an agnostic, were devout Christians,
and Steinbock and Beardsley were so towards their
lives' end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet
I think it but deepened despair and multiplied
temptation.

" Dark Angel, with thine aching lust,
To rid the world of penitence :
Malicious angel, who still dost
My soul such subtil violence !

When music sounds, then changest thou
A silvery to a sultry fire :
Nor will thine envious heart allow
Delight untortured by desire.

191

Through thee, the gracious Muses turn
To Furies, O mine Enemy !
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.

Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears :
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears."

Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day?
with hearts that Christianity, as shaped by history,
cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear out our love;
no school of painting outlasts its founders, every
stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-
Raphaelitism had some twenty years; impressionism
thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion
can never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that
our air is disturbed, as Malarme said, by " the
trembling of the veil of the temple," or " that our
whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book?"
Some of us thought that book near towards the end
of last century, but the tide sank again.

I DO not know whether John Davidson, whose life
also was tragic, made that " morbid effort," that
search for " perfection of thought and feeling," for
he is hidden behind failure, to unite it "to perfection
of form." At eleven one morning I met him in the
British Museum reading room, probably in 1894, when
I was in London for the production of The Land of
Heart9 s Desire, but certainly after some long absence
from London. "Are you working here?" I said;
" No," he said, " I am loafing, for I have finished

192

my day's work." "What, already?" "I work
an hour a day — I cannot work longer without ex-
haustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and
get into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is
why I loaf when my work is finished." No one had
ever doubted his industry ; he had supported his wife
and family for years by " devilling " many hours a
day for some popular novelist. " What work is it?"
I said. " I am writing verse," he answered. " I
had been writing prose for a long time, and then one
day I thought I might just as well write what I liked,
as I must starve in any case. It was the luckiest
thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty
pounds for a ballad, and I made three hundred out
of my last book of verse."

He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers ;
a national schoolmaster from Scotland, he had been
dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in his
salary, and had come to London with his wife and
children. He looked older than his years. " Ellis,"
he had said, " how old are you?" " Fifty," Edwin
Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. " Then I will
take off my wig. I never take off my wig when there
is a man under thirty in the room." He had endured
and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury,
which was made much harder by the conviction that
the world was against him, that he was refused for
some reason his rightful position. Ellis thought that
he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots
jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate.

During the quarrel over Parnell's grave a quotation
from Goethe ran through the papers, describing our
Irish jealousy : " The Irish seem to me like a pack
of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag."
But I do not think we object to distinction for its

193

own sake ; if we kill the stag, it is that we may carry
off his head and antlers. " The Irish people,"
O'Leary used to say, " do not know good from bad
in any art, but they do not hate the good once it is
pointed out to them because it is good." An infallible
Church, with its Mass in Latin, and its mediaeval
philosophy, and our Protestant social prejudice, have
kept our ablest men from levelling passions; but
Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, see-
ing that Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour
grapes. He saw in delicate, laborious, discriminating
taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would, when that
mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy,
popular, and bustling. Once when I had praised Her-
bert Home for his knowledge and his taste, he burst
out, " If a man must be a connoisseur, let him be a
connoisseur in women." He, indeed, was accustomed,
in the most characteristic phrase of his type, to de-
scribe the Rhymers as lacking in "blood and guts,"
and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting
to supply the deficiency by the addition of four
Scotsmen. He brought all four upon the same
evening, and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat,
evidently intended for a recitation ; another described
how, when gold-digging in Australia, he had fought
and knocked down another miner for doubting the
rotundity of the earth ; while of the remainder I can
remember nothing except that they excelled in argu-
ment. He insisted upon their immediate election,
and the Rhymers, through that complacency of good
manners whereby educated Englishmen so often sur-
prise me, obeyed, though secretly resolved never to
meet again; and it cost me, seven hours' work to get
another meeting, and vote the Scotsmen out. A
few days later I chanced upon Davidson at some

N

194

restaurant; he was full of amiability, and when we
parted shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically
that I had " blood and guts." I think he might
have grown to be a successful man had he been
enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or
Home or Symons, for they had what I still lacked,
conscious deliberate craft, and what I must lack al-
ways, scholarship. They had taught me that violent
energy, which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a
few minutes the nervous vitality, and is useless in the
arts. Our fire must burn slowly, and we must con-
stantly turn away to think, constantly analyse what
we have done, be content even to have little life out-
side our work, to show, perhaps, to other men, as
little as the watch-mender shows, his magnifying glass
caught in his screwed-up eye. Only then do we learn to
conserve our vitality, to keep our mind enough under
control and to make our technique sufficiently flexible
for expression of the emotions of life as they arise. A
few months after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson
had spent his inspiration. "The fires are out," he said,
" and I must hammer the cold iron." When I heard
a few years ago that he had drowned himself, I knew
that I had always expected some such end. With
enough passion to make a great poet, through meet-
ing no man of culture in early life, he lacked intel-
lectual receptivity, and, anarchic and indefinite,
lacked pose and gesture, and now no verse of his
clings to my memory.

XI

GRADUALLY Arthur Symons came to replace in
my intimate friendship, Lionel Johnson from whom

195

I was slowly separated by a scruple of conscience.
If he came to see me he sat tongue-tied unless I gave
him the drink that seemed necessary to bring his
vitality to but its normal pitch, and if I called upon
him he drank so much that I became his confederate.
Once, when a friend and I had sat long after our
proper bed-time at his constantly repeated and most
earnest entreaty, knowing what black melancholy
would descend upon him at our departure, and with
the unexpressed hope of getting him to his bed, ne
fixed upon us a laughing and whimsical look, and
said : — " I want you two men to understand that you
are merely two men that I am drinking with." That
was the only time that I was to hear from him an
imaginary conversation that had not an air of the
most scrupulous accuracy. He gave two accounts of
a conversation with Wilde in prison; in one
Wilde wore his hair long, and in the other it had
been cropped by the prison barber. He was gradually
losing, too, the faculty of experience, and in his prose
and verse repeated the old ideas and emotions, but
faintly, as though with fading interest. I am certain
that he prayed much, and on those rare days that I
came upon him dressed and active before midday or
but little after, I concluded that he had been to morn-
ing Mass at Farm Street.

When with Johnson I had tuned myself to his mood,
but Arthur Symons, more than any man I have ever
known, could slip as it were into the mind of an-
other, and my thoughts gained in richness and in
clearness from his sympathy, nor shall I ever know
how much my practice and my theory owe to the pas-
sages that he read me from Catullus and from Verlaine
and Mallarme'. I had read Axel to myself or was still
reading it, so slowly, and with so much difficulty, that

196

certain passages had an exaggerated importance, while
all remained so obscure that I could without much
effort imagine that here at last was the Sacred Book I
longed for. An Irish friend of mine lives in a house
where beside a little old tower rises a great new Gothic
hall and stair, and I have sometimes got him to ex-
tinguish all light but a little Roman lamp, and in that
faint light and among great vague shadows, blotting
away the unmeaning ornament, have imagined myself
partaking in some incredible romance. Half-a-dozen
times, beginning in boyhood with Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound, I have in that mood possessed
for certain hours or months the book that I long for ;
and Symons, without ever being false to his own im-
pressionist view of art and of life, deepened as I think
my longing.

It seems to me, looking backward, that we always
discussed life at its most intense moment, that
moment which gives a common sacredness to the Song
of Songs, and to the Sermon on the Mount, and in
which one discovers something supernatural, a stirring
as it were of the roots of the hair. He was making
those translations from Mallarme and from Verlaine,
from Calderon, from St. John of the Cross, which are
the most accomplished metrical translations of our
time, and I think that those from Mallarme may have
given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to
the latter poems of The Wind Among the Reeds, to
The Shadowy Waters, while Villiers de L'Isle Adam
had shaped whatever in my Rosa Alchemica Pater had
not shaped. I can remember the day in Fountain
Court when he first read me Herodiade's address to
some Sibyl who is her nurse and it may be the moon
also:

197

" The horror of my virginity
Delights me, and I would envelope me
In the terror of my tresses, that, by night,
Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white
And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire,
Thou that art chaste and diest of desire,
White night of ice and of the cruel snow !
Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo
My dreams uplifted before thee I now, apart,
So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart,
And all about me lives but in mine own
Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride,
Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed."

Yet I am certain that there was something in my-
self compelling me to attempt creation of an art as
separate from everything heterogenous and casual,
from all character and circumstance, as some
Herodiade of our theatre, dancing seemingly alone
in her narrow moving luminous circle. Certainly I had
gone a great distance from my first poems, from all
that I had copied from the folk-art of Ireland, as from
the statue of Mausolus and his Queen, where the
luminous circle is motionless and contains the entire
popular life; and yet why am I so certain? I can
imagine an Aran Islander who had strayed into the
Luxembourg Gallery, turning bewildered from Impres-
sionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau's
" Jason," to study in minute astonishment the elabo-
rate background, where there are so many jewels, so
much wrought stone and moulded bronze. Had not
lover promised mistress in his own island song, "A ship
with a gold and silver mast, gloves of the skin of a
fish, and shoes of the skin of a bird, and a suit of
the dearest silk in Ireland?"

198

XII

HITHERTO when in London I had stayed with my
family in Bedford Park, but now I was to live for
some twelve months in chambers in the Temple that
opened through a little passage into those of Arthur
Symons. If anybody rang at either door, one or other
would look through a window in the connecting pas-
sage, and report. We would then decide whether one
or both should receive the visitor, whether his door
or mine should be opened, or whether both doors
were to remain closed. I have never liked London,
but London seemed less disagreeable when one could
walk in quiet, empty places after dark, and upon a
Sunday morning sit upon the margin of a fountain
almost as alone as if in the country. I was already
settled there, I imagine, when a publisher called and
proposed that Symons should edit a Review or Maga-
zine, and Symons consented on the condition that
Beardsley were Art Editor — and I was delighted at his
condition, as I think were all his other proposed contri-
butors. Aubrey Beardsley had been dismissed from
the Art editorship of The Yellow Book under circum-
stances that had made us indignant. He had
illustrated Wilde's Salome, his strange satiric art
had raised the popular press to fury, and at the height
of the excitement aroused by Wilde's condemnation,
a popular novelist, a woman who had great influence
among the most conventional part of the British
public, had written demanding his dismissal. " She
owed it to her position before the British people," she
had said. Beardsley was not even a friend of Wilde's
— they even disliked each other — he had no sexual
abnormality, but he was certainly unpopular, and the

199

moment had come to get rid of unpopular persons.
The public at once concluded — they could hardly con-
clude otherwise, he was dismissed by telegram — that
there was evidence against him, and Beardsley, who
was some twenty-three years old, being embittered
and miserable, plunged into dissipation. We knew
that we must face an infuriated press and public, but
being all young we delighted in enemies and in every-
thing that had an heroic air.

XIII

WE might have survived but for our association with
Beardsley, perhaps, but for his Under the Hill, a
Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary genius
as great maybe as his artistic genius, and for the
refusal of the bookseller who controlled the railway
bookstalls to display our wares. The bookseller's
manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley's,
pitched upon Blake's Anteus setting Virgil and Dante
upon the verge of Cocytus as the ground of refusal,
and when Arthur Symons pointed out that Blake was
considered " a very spiritual artist ", replied, " O,
Mr Symons, you must remember that we have an
audience of young ladies as well as an audience of
agnostics." However, he called Arthur Symons back
from the door to say, " If contrary to our expecta-
tions The Savoy should have a large sale, we should
be very glad to see you again." As Blake's design
illustrated an article of mine, I wrote a letter upon
that remarkable saying to* a principal daily newspaper.
But I had mentioned Beardsley, and I was told that
the editor had made it a rule that his paper was

200

never to mention Beardsley's name. I said upon meet-
ing him later, " Would you have made the same rule
in the case of Hogarth?" against whom much the
same objection could be taken, and he replied with
what seemed to me a dreamy look, as though suddenly
reminded of a lost opportunity — " Ah, there was no
popular press in Hogarth's day." We were not
allowed to forget that in our own day there was a
popular press, and its opinions began to affect our
casual acquaintance, and even our comfort in public
places. At some well-known house, an elderly man to
whom I had just been introduced, got up from my
side and walked to the other end of the room; but
it was as much my reputation as an Irish rebel as the
evil company that I was supposed to keep, that excited
some young men in a railway carriage to comment
upon my general career in voices raised that they
might catch my attention. I discovered, however,
one evening that we were perhaps envied as well as
despised. I was in the pit at some theatre, and had
just noticed Arthur Symons a little in front of me,
when I heard a young man, who looked like a shop-
assistant or clerk, say, " There is Arthur Symons. If
he can't get an order, why can't he pay for a stall."
Clearly we were supposed to prosper upon iniquity,
and to go to the pit added a sordid parsimony. At
another theatre I caught sight of a woman that I
once liked, the widow of some friend of my father's
youth, and tried to attract her attention, but she had
no eyes for anything but the stage curtain ; and at some
house where I met no hostility to myself, a popular
novelist snatched out of my hand a copy of The Savoy,
and opening it at Beardsley's drawing, called The
Barber, began to expound its bad drawing and wound
up with, " Now if you want to admire really great

201

black and white art, admire the Punch Cartoons of Mr
Lindley Sambourne," and our hostess, after making
peace between us, said, " O, Mr Yeats, why do you
not send your poems to The Spectator instead of to The
Savoy." The answer, "My friends read the Savoy and
they do not read The Spectator," brought a look of
deeper disapproval.

Yet, even apart from Beardsley, we were a
sufficiently distinguished body : Max Beerbohm, Ber-
nard Shaw, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur
Symons, Charles Conder, Charles Shannon, Havelock
Ellis, Selwyn Image, Joseph Conrad; but nothing
counted but the one hated name. I think that had
we been challenged we might have argued something
after this fashion : — " Science through much ridicule
and some persecution has won its right to explore
whatever passes before its corporeal eye, and merely
because it passes : to set as it were upon an equality
the beetle and the whale though Ben Jonson could
find no justification for the entomologist in The New
Inn, but that he had been crossed in love. Literature
now demands the same right of exploration of all that
passes before the mind's eyes, and merely because it
passes." Not a complete defence, for it substitutes
a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it
may be for the moment, and to settle our place in the
historical process.

The critic might well reply that certain of my
generation delighted in writing with an unscientific
partiality for subjects long forbidden. Yet is it not
most important to explore especially what has been
long forbidden, and to do this not only " with the
highest moral purpose," like the followers of Ibsen,
but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight in
that play of the mind. Donne could be as meta-

202

physical as he pleased, and yet never seemed unhuman
and hysterical as Shelley often does, because he could
be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will
thirst for the metaphysical, who have a parched
tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision of Evil ?

I have felt in certain early works of my own which
I have long abandoned, and here and there in the
work of others of my generation, a slight, sentimental
sensuality which is disagreeable, and doesn't exist in
the work of Donne, let us say, because he, being per-
mitted to say what he pleased, was never tempted to
linger, or rather to pretend that we can linger,
between spirit and sense. How often had I heard
men of my time talk of the meeting of spirit and
sense, yet there is no meeting but only change upon
the instant, and it is by the perception of a change like
the sudden "blacking out" of the lights of the stage,,
that passion creates its most violent sensation.

XIV

DOWSON was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy
village. Wilde, too, was at Dieppe; and Symons,
Beardsley, and others would cross and recross, return-
ing with many tales, and there were letters and tele-
grams. Dowson wrote a protest against some friend's
too vivid essay upon the disorder of his life, and ex-
plained that in reality he was living a life of industry
in a little country village; but before the letter
arrived that friend received a wire, " arrested, sell
watch and send proceeds." Dowson 's watch had been
left in London — and then another wire, " Am free."
Dowson, ran the tale as I heard it ten years after,
had got drunk and fought the baker, and a deputation

208

of villagers had gone to the magistrate and pointed
out that Monsieur Dowson was one of the most
illustrious of English poets. " Quite right to remind
me," said the magistrate, " I will imprison the
baker."

A Rhymer had seen Dowson at some cafe in Dieppe
with a particularly common harlot, and as he passed,
Dowson, who was half drunk, caught him by the
sleeve and whispered, " She writes poetry — it is like
Browning and Mrs Browning." Then there came a
wonderful tale, repeated by Dowson himself, whether
by word of mouth or by letter I do not remember.
Wilde has arrived in Dieppe, and Dowson presses
upon him the necessity of acquiring " a more whole-
some taste." They empty their pockets on to the cafe
table, and though there is not much, there is enough
if both heaps are put into one. Meanwhile the news
has spread, and they set out accompanied by a cheer-
ing crowd. Arrived at their destination, Dowson
and the crowd remain outside, and presently Wilde
returns. He says in a low voice to Dowson, " The
first these ten years, and it will be the last. It was
like cold mutton " — always, as Henley had said, " a
scholar and a gentleman," he no doubt remem-
bered the sense in which the Elizabethan dramatists
used the words " Cold mutton " — and then aloud so
that the crowd may hear him, " But tell it in England,
for it will entirely restore my character."

XV

WHEN the first few numbers of The Savoy had been
published, the contributors and the publisher gave
themselves a supper, and Symons explained that cer-

204

tain among us were invited afterwards to the
publisher's house, and if I went there that once I
need never go again. I considered the publisher a
scandalous person, and had refused to meet him ; we
were all agreed as to his character, and only differed
as to the distance that should lie between him and
us. I had just received two letters, one from T. W.
Rolleston protesting with all the conventional moral
earnestness of an article in The Spectator newspaper,
against my writing for such a magazine; and one
from A. E. denouncing that magazine, which he called
the " Organ of the Incubi and the Succubi," with the
intensity of a personal conviction. I had forgotten
that Arthur Symons had borrowed the letters until
as we stood about the supper table waiting for the
signal to be seated, I heard the infuriated voice of
the publisher shouting, " Give me the letter, give
me the letter, I will prosecute that man," and I saw
Symons waving Rolleston's letter just out of reach.
Then Symons folded it up and put it in his pocket,
and began to read out A. E. and the publisher was
silent, and I saw Beardsley listening. Presently
Beardsley came to me and said, " Yeats, I am going
to surprise you very much. I think your friend is
right. All my life I have been fascinated by the
spiritual life — when a child I saw a vision of a
Bleeding Christ over the mantelpiece — but after all
to do one's work when there are other things one
wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion."

Something, I forget what, delayed me a few minutes
after the supper was over, and when I arrived at our
publisher's I found Beardsley propped up on a chair
in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and
as I came in he left the chair and went into another
room to spit blood, but returned immediately. Our

205

publisher, perspiration pouring from his face, was
turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano — it worked
by electricity, I was told, when the company did not
cut off the supply — and very plainly had had enough
of it, but Beardsley pressed him to labour on, " The
tone is so beautiful," "It gives me such deep pleasure,"
etc., etc. It was his method of keeping our publisher
at a distance.

Another image competes with that image in my
memory. Beardsley has arrived at Fountain Court
a little after breakfast with a young woman who be-
longs to our publisher's circle and certainly not to
ours, and is called " twopence coloured," or is it
"penny plain." He is a little drunk and his mind has
been running upon his dismissal from The Yellow
Boole, for he puts his hand upon the wall and stares
into a mirror. He mutters, " Yes, yes. I look like a
Sodomite," which he certainly did not. " But no, I
am not that," and then begins railing, against his
ancestors, accusing them of that and this, back to
and including the great Pitt, from whom he declares
himself descended.

XVI

I CAN no more justify my convictions in these brief
chapters, where I touch on fundamental things, than
Shakespeare could justify within the limits of a
sonnet, his conviction that the soul of the wide world
dreams of things to come; and yet as I have set out
to describe nature as I see it, I must not only describe
events but those patterns •into which they fall, when
I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest
once said to Maud Gonne and myself and to an

206

English Catholic who had come with us, that a certain
holy woman had been the " victim " for his village,
and that another holy woman who had been " victim "
for all France, had given him her Crucifix, because
he, too, was doomed to become a " victim."

French psychical research has offered evidence to
support the historical proofs that such saints as
Lydwine of Schiedam, whose life suggested to Paul
Claudel his L'Annonce faite a Marie, did really cure
disease by taking it upon themselves. As disease was
considered the consequence of sin, to take it upon
themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that
mind flows into mind, and that we cannot separate
mind and body, drives me to accept the thought of
victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself
if I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius
of Beardsley. He was in my Lunar metaphor a man
of the thirteenth Phase, his nature on the edge of
Unity of Being, the understanding of that Unity by
the intellect his one overmastering purpose; whereas
Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of the saints,
are at the seven and twentieth Phase, and seek a unity
with a life beyond individual being ; and so being all
subjective he would take upon himself not the con-
sequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender
myself to the wild thought that by so doing he en-
abled persons who had never heard his name,
to recover innocence. I have so often, too, practised
meditations, or experienced dreams, where the medita-
tions or dreams of two or three persons contrast and
complement one another, in so far as those persons are
in themselves complementary or contrasting, that I am
convinced that it is precisely from the saint or poten-
tial saint that he would gather this knowledge. I
see in his fat women and shadowy, pathetic girls, his

207

horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all the
lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published
designs, the phantasms that from the beginning have
defied the scourge and the hair shirt. I once said to
him half seriously, " Beardsley, I was defending you
last night in the only way in which it is possible to
defend you, by saying that all you draw is inspired by
rage against iniquity," and he answered, " If it were
so inspired the work would be in no way different,"
meaning, as I think, that he drew with such sincerity
that no change of motive could change the image.

I know that some turn of disease had begun
to parade erotic images before his eyes, and
I do not doubt that he drew these images.
"I make a blot upon the paper," he said to me;
" And I begin to shove the ink about and some-
thing comes." But I was wrong to say that he drew
these things in rage against iniquity, for to know that
rage he must needs be objective, concerned with other
people, with the Church or the Divinity, with some-
thing outside his own head, and responsible not for
the knowledge but for the consequence of sin. His
preparation had been the exhaustion of sin in act,
while the preparation of the Saint is the exhaustion
of his pride, and instead of the Saint's humility, he
had come to see the images of the mind in a kind of
frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect.

Does not all art come when a nature, that never
ceases to judge itself, exhausts personal emotion in
action or desire so completely that something im-
personal, something that has nothing to do with
action or desire, suddenly starts into its place, some-
thing which is as unforeseen, as completely organized,
even as unique, as the images that pass before the
mind between sleeping and waking.

208

But all art is not victimage; and much of the
hatred of the art of Beardsley came from the fact
that victimage, though familiar under another name
to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was
not known in England. He pictures almost always
disillusion, and apart from those privately published
drawings which he tried upon his deathbed to have
destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even
the beautiful women are exaggerated into doll-like
prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are poignant with
a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with
more understanding now, than when he lived, for in
1895 or 1896, I was in despair at the new breath of
comedy that had begun to wither the beauty that 1
loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite
itself to mystery. I said to him once, " You have
never done anything to equal your Salome with the
head of John the Baptist." I think, that for the
moment he was sincere when he replied, " Yes, yes ;
but beauty is so difficult." It was for the moment
only, for as the popular rage increased and his own
disease increased, he became more and more violent
in his satire, or created out of a spirit of mockery a
form of beauty where his powerful logical intellect
eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or
even satisfied passion.

The distinction between the Image, between the
apparition as it were, and the personal action and
desire, took a new form at the approach of death.
He made two or three charming and blasphemous
designs ; I think especially of a Madonna and Child,
where the Child has a foolish, doll-like face, and an
elaborate modern baby's dress; and of a St. Rose of
Luna in an expensive gown decorated with roses,
ascending to Heaven upon the bosom of the Madonna,

209

her face enraptured with love, but with that form of
it which is least associated with sanctity. I think that
his conversion to Catholicism was sincere, but that so
much of impulse as could exhaust itself in prayer and
ceremony, in formal action and desire, found
itself mocked by the antithetical image ; and yet I am
perhaps mistaken, perhaps it was merely his recogni-
tion that historical Christianity had dwindled to a box
of toys, and that it might be amusing to empty the
whole box on to the counterpane.

XVII

I HAD been a good deal in Paris, though never very
long at any time, my later visits with a member of
the Rhymer's Club whose curiosity or emotion was
roused by every pretty girl. He treated me with a
now admiring, now mocking wonder, because being
in love, and in no way lucky in that love, I had grown
exceedingly puritanical so far as my immediate neigh-
bourhood was concerned. One night, close to the
Luxembourg, a strange young woman in bicycling
costume, came out of a side street, threw one arm
about his neck, walked beside us in perfect silence for
a hundred yards or so, and then darted up another
side street. He had a red and white complexion and
fair hair, but how she discovered that in the dark I
could not understand. I became angry and reproach-
ful, but he defended himself by saying, " You never
meet a stray cat without caressing it : I have similar
instincts." Presently we* found ourselves at some
Cafe*— the Cafe D'Harcourt, I think— and when I
looked up from my English newspaper, I found my-
o

210

self surrounded with painted ladies and saw that he
was taking vengeance. I could not have carried on
a conversation in French, but I was able to say,
" That gentleman over there has never refused wine
or coffee to any lady," and in a little they had all
settled about him like greedy pigeons.

I had put my ideal of those years, an ideal that
passed away with youth, into my description of
Proud Costello. " He was of those ascetics of
passion, who keep their hearts pure for love or for
hatred, as other men for God, for Mary and for the
Saints." My friend was not interested in passion. A
woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity
in her beauty or her circumstance, and drew him the
more if the curiosity she aroused were half intel-
lectual. A little after the time I write of, throwing
himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall
or hippodrome, he began, " O, Yeats, I was never in
love with a serpent-charmer before." He was objec-
tive. For him " the visible world existed " as he
was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a Moon
that had entered its fourth quarter.

XVIII

AT first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and
his gracious young wife near the Champ de Mars,
or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself iij a
student's hotel in the Latin quarter, and I cannot
remember always where I stayed when this or that
event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or Macgregor,
for he had now shed the " Mathers," would come
down to breakfast one day with his Horace, the next

211

day with his Macpherson's Ossian, and read out
fragments during breakfast, considering both books
of equal authenticity. Once when I questioned that
of Ossian, he got into a rage — what right had I to
take sides with the English enemy — and I found that
for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged.
At night he would dress himself in Highland dress,
and dance the sword dance, and his mind brooded
upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I
have at moments doubted whether he had seen the
Highlands, or even, until invited there by some White
Rose Society, Scotland itself. Every Sunday he gave
to the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that
day he would spit blood. That did not matter, he
said, because it came from his head, not his lungs;
what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he
lived under some great strain, and presently I noted
that he was drinking neat brandy, not to drunken-
ness, but to detriment of mind and body.

He began to foresee changes in the world, announc-
ing in 1893 or 1894, the imminence of immense wars,
and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned ambulance
work, and made others learn it? He had a
sabre wound on his wrist — or perhaps his forehead,
for my memory is not clear — got in some student riot
that he had mistaken for the beginning of war. It
may have been some talk of his that made me write
the poem that begins :

" The dews drop slowly and dreams gather ;

unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes,
And then the clash, of fallen horsemen and the

cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my

ears."

212

War was to bring, or be brought by, anarchy, but
that would be a passing stage, he declared, for his
dreams were all Napoleonic. He certainly foresaw
some great role that he could play, had made him-
self an acknowledged master of the war-game, and
for a time taught it to French officers for his living.
He was to die of melancholia, and was perhaps already
mad at certain moments or upon certain topics,
though he did not make upon me that impression in
those early days, being generous, gay, and affable.
1 have seen none that lacked philosophy and trod
Hodos Camelionis come to good there ; and he lacked
it but for a vague affirmation, that he would have
his friends affirm also, each for himself, " There is
no part of me that is not of the Gods." Once, when
he had told me that he met his Teachers in some
great crowd, and only knew that they were phantoms
by a shock that was like an electric shock to his heart,
I asked him how he knew that he was not deceived or
hallucinated. He said, " I had been visited by one
of them the other night, and I followed him out, and
followed him down that little lane to the right. Pre-
sently I fell over the milk boy, and the milk boy got
in a rage because he said that not only I but the man
in front had fallen over him." He like all that I have
known, who have given themselves up to images, and
to the murmuring of images, thought that when he
had proved that an image could act independently of
his mind, he had proved also that neither it, nor what
it had murmured, had originated there. Yet had I
need of proof to the contrary, I had it while under
his roof. I was eager for news of the Spanish- Ameri-
can war, and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast
to buy a New York Herald. As I went out past the
young Normandy servant who was laying breakfast,

213

I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had
just reached a place where I carried my arm in a
sling after some remarkable escape. I bought my
paper and returned, to find Macgregor on the door-
step. "Why, you are all right," he said, "What did
the Bonne mean by telling me that you had hurt your
arm and carried it in a sling."

Once when I met him in the street in his Highland
•clothes, with several knives in his stocking, he said,
" When I am dressed like this I feel like a walking
flame," and I think that everything he did was but
an attempt to feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart
he was, I think, gentle, and perhaps even a little
timid. He had some impediment in his nose that gave
him a great deal of trouble, and it could have been
removed had he not shrunk from the, slight operation ;
and once when he was left in a mouse-infested flat
with some live traps, he collected his captives into a
large birdcage, and to avoid the necessity of their
drowning, fed them there for weeks. Being a self-
educated, un-scholarly, though learned man, he was
bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the
most crude form, and being arrogant, to prevent as far
as possible that alternation between the two natures
which is, it may be, necessary to sanity. When
the nature turns to its spiritual opposite alone there
•can be no alternation, but what nature is pure enough
for that.

I see Paris in the Eighteen-nineties as a number
of events separated from one another, and without
<;ause or consequence, without lot or part in the
logical structure of my Ijf e ; I can often as little find
their dates as I can those of events in my early child-
hood. William Sharp, who came to see me there,
may have come in 1895, or on some visit four or five

214

years later, but certainly I was in an hotel in the
Boulevard Raspail. When he stood up to go he said,
"What is that?" pointing to a geometrical form
painted upon a little piece of cardboard that lay upon
my window sill. And then before I could answer,
looked out of the window saying, " There is a funeral
passing." I said, " That is curious, as the Death
symbol is painted upon the card." I did not look,
but I am sure there was no funeral. A few days later
he came back and said, " I have been very ill ; you
must never allow me to see that symbol again." He
did not seem anxious to be questioned, but years later
he said, "I will now tell you what happened in Paris.
I had two rooms at my hotel, a front sitting-room and
a bedroom leading out of it. As I passed the thres-
hold of the sitting-room, I saw a woman standing at
the bureau writing, and presently she went into my
bedroom. I thought somebody had got into the wrong
room by mistake, but when I went to the bureau I
saw the sheet of paper she had seemed to write upon,
and there was no writing upon it. I went into my
bed-room and I found nobody, but as there was a
door from the bedroom on to the stairs I went down
the stairs to see if she had gone that way. When I
got out into the street I saw her just turning a
corner, but when I turned the corner there was no-
body there, and then I saw her at another corner.
Constantly seeing her and losing her like that I
followed till I came to the Seine, and there I saw
her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down
into the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell
why, but I went to the opening in the wall and stood
there, just as she had stood, taking just the same
attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and
that I heard a sheep bell. After that I must have

215

lost consciousness, for I knew nothing till I found my-
self lying on my back, dripping wet, and people
standing all round. I had thrown myself into the
Seine."

I did not believe him, and not because I thought
the story impossible, for I knew he had a susceptibility
beyond that of any one I had ever known, to symbolic
or telepathic influence, but because he never told one
anything that was true ; the facts of life disturbed him
and were forgotten. The story had been created by
the influence but it had remained a reverie, though
he may in the course of years have come to believe
that it happened as an event. The affectionate hus-
band of his admiring and devoted wife, he had
created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her
the authorship of all his books that had any talent,
and though habitually a sober man, I have known him
to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication
when most men speak the truth, to attribute his state
to remorse for having been unfaithful to Fiona
Macleod.

Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of
his nature with so little apparent resistance that he
seemed like a bad child, though to read his sacred
poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant
shared His first home with the beasts. In what month
was it that I received a note inviting me to " coffee
and cigarettes plentifully," and signed " Yours quite
cheerfully, Paul Verlaine? " I found him at the top
of a tenement house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting
in an easy chair, his bad leg swaddled in many band-
ages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew
Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had
scorched his leg for he know it " well, too well " and
" lived in it like a fly in a pot of marmalade." He

216

took up an English dictionary, one of the few books
in the room, and began searching for the name of his
disease, selecting after a long search and with, as I
understood, only comparative accuracy " Erysipelas."
Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the
coffee and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she
who had given the room its character ; her canaries in
several cages hanging in the window, and her senti-
mental lithographs nailed here and there among the
nude drawings and newspaper caricatures of her lover
as various kinds of monkey, which he had pinned upon
the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his
trousers belted with a piece of rope and an opera
hat upon his head. She drew a box over to the fire,
and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his
knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately
for he kept constantly closing and opening it. Ver-
laine introduced him by saying, " He is a poor man,
but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at
that we call him Louis the Xlth." I remember that
Verlaine talked of Victor Hugo who was " a supreme
poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame," and of
Villiers de L'Isle Adam who was " exalte " and wrote
excellent French ; and of In Memoriam, which he had
tried to translate and could not. " Tennyson is too
noble, too Anglais ; when he should have been broken-
hearted, he had many reminiscences."

At Verlaine 's burial, but a few months after, his
mistress quarrelled with a publisher at the graveside
as to who owned the sheet by which the body had
been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas
that he found leaning against a tree in the Cemetery.

217

XIX

I AM certain of one date, for I have gone to much
trouble to get it right. I met John Synge for the
first time in the Autumn of 1896, when I was one and
thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel
Corneille instead of my usual lodging, and why I can-
not remember for I thought it expensive. Synge's
biographer says that you boarded there for a
pound a week, but I was accustomed to cook my own
breakfast, and dine at an anarchist restaurant in the
Boulevard S. Jacques for little over a shilling. Some
one, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor
Irishman at the top of the house, and presently intro-
duced us. Synge had come lately from Italy, and had
played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest ; six
months of travel upon fifty pounds ; and was now read-
ing French literature and writing morbid and
melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned
Irish at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the
Aran Islands and find a life that had never been ex-
pressed in literature, instead of a life where all had
been expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I
felt he needed something to take him out of his
morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would have
given the same advice to any young Irish writer who
knew Irish, for I had been that summer upon Inish-
maan and Inishmore, and was full of the subject. My
friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find
ourselves among a group of islanders, one of whom
said he would bring us to the oldest man upon Inish-
maan. This old man, speaking very slowly, but with
laughing eyes, had said, " If any gentleman has done
a crime, we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that

218

killed his father, and I had him in my own house six
months till he got away to America."

From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought
him to Maude Gonne's, under whose persuasion per-
haps, he joined the " Young Ireland Society of
Paris," the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian
Irish, signed, but resigned after a few months be-
cause " it wanted to stir up Continental nations
against England, and England will never give us free-
dom until she feels she is safe," the one political
sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a year was
to pass before he took my advice and settled for a
while in an Aran cottage, and became happy, having
escaped at last, as he wrote, " from the squalor of
the poor and the nullity of the rich." I almost forget
the prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I
read it all through again when after his death I de-
cided, at his written request, what was to be published
and what not. Indeed, I have but a vague impression,
as of a man trying to look out of a window and
blurring all that he sees by breathing upon the window.
According to my Lunar parable, he was a man of the
twenty-third Phase, a man whose subjective lives — for
a constant return to our life is a part of my dream —
were over, who must not pursue an image, but fly from
it, all that subjective dreaming, that had once been
power and joy, now corrupting within him. He had
to take the first plunge into the world beyond himself,
the first plunge away from himself that is always pure
technique, the delight in doing, not because one would
or should, but merely because one can do.

He once said to me, " a man has to bring up his
family and be as virtuous as is compatible with so
doing, and if he does more than that he is a puritan ;
a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as

219

much beauty as is compatible with that, and if he
does more he is an aesthete," that is to say, he was
consciously objective. Whenever he tried to write
drama without dialect he wrote badly, and he made
several attempts, because only through dialect could
he escape self-expression, see all that he did from
without, allow his intellect to judge the images of
his mind as if they had been created by some other
mind. His objectivity was, however, technical only,
for in those images paraded all the desires of his
heart. He was timid, too shy for general conversa-
tion, an invalid and full of moral scruple, and he was
to create now some ranting braggadocio, now some
tipsy hag full of poetical speech, and now some young
man or girl full of the most abounding health. He
never spoke an unkind word, had admirable manners,
and yet his art was to fill the streets with rioters, and
to bring upon his dearest friends enemies that may
last their lifetime.

No mind can engender till divided into two, but
that of a Keats or a Shelley falls into an intellectual
part that follows, and a hidden emotional flying
image, whereas in a mind like that of Synge the
emotional part is dreaded and stagnant, while the in-
tellectual part is a clear mirror-like technical achieve-
ment.

But in writing of Synge I have run far ahead, for
in 1896 he was but one picture among many. I am
often astonished when I think that we can meet un-
moved some person, or pass some house, that in later
years is to bear a chief part in our life. Should there
not be some flutter of the nerve or stopping of the
heart like that Macgregor experienced at the first
meeting with a phantom?

XX

MANY pictures come before me without date or
order. I am walking somewhere near the Luxembourg
Gardens when Synge, who seldom generalises and only
after much thought, says, " There are three things
any two of which have often come together but never
all three; ecstasy, asceticism, austerity; I wish to
bring all three together."

I notice that Macgregor considers William Sharp
vague and sentimental, while Sharp is repelled by
Macgregor's hardness and arrogance. William Sharp
met Macgregor in the Louvre, and said, " No doubt
considering your studies you live upon milk and fruit."
And Macgregor replied, " No, not exactly milk and
fruit, but very nearly so ;" and now Sharp has lunched
with Macgregor and been given nothing but brandy
and radishes.

Macgregor is much troubled by ladies who seek
spiritual advice, and one has called to ask his help
against phantoms who have the appearance of decayed
corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night.
He has driven her away with one furious sentence,
" Very bad taste on both sides."

I am sitting in a Cafe* with two French Americans,
one in the morning, while we are talking wildly, and
some are dancing, there is a tap at the shuttered win-

221

dow; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of
a man of letters, who thought to find no one but a
confederate, and her husband's two young sisters
whom she has brought secretly to some disreputable
dance. She is very confused at seeing us, but as she
looks from one to another understands that we have
taken some drug and laughs; caught in our dream
we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to
our code and to all codes, but smile at her benevo-
lently and laugh.

I am at Stuart Merrill's, and I meet there a young
Jewish Persian scholar. He has a large gold ring,
seemingly very rough, made by some amateur, and
he shows me that it has shaped itself to his finger,
and says, " That is because it contains no alloy — it
is alchemical gold." I ask who made the gold, and
he says a certain Rabbi, and begins to talk of the
Rabbi's miracles. We do not question him — perhaps
it is true — perhaps he has imagined at all — we are
inclined to accept every historical belief once more.

I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans,
a German poet Douchenday, and a silent man whom
I discover to be Strindberg, and who is looking for
the Philosopher's Stone. The French American
reads out a manifesto he is about to issue to the
Latin Quarter ; it proposes to establish a communistic
colony of artists in Virginia, and there is a footnote
to explain why he selects Virginia, " Art has never
flourished twice in the same place. Art has never
flourished in Virginia."

Douchenday, who has some reputation as a poet,
explains that his poems are without verbs, as the
verb is the root of all evil in the world. He wishes
for an art where all things are immoveable, as though
the clouds should be made of marble. I turn over
the page of one of his books which he shows me, and
find there a poem in dramatic form, but when I
ask if he hopes to have it played he says : — " It could
only be played by actors before a black marble wall,
with masks in their hands. They must not wear the
masks for that would not express my scorn for
reality."

I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's
Ubu Roi, at the Theatre de L'Oeuvre, with the
Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the
bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists
at one another, and the Rhymer whispers to me,
" There are often duels after these performances,"
and he explains to me what is happening on the stage.
The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes,
and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and
I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is
some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the
kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound
to support the most spirited party, we have shouted
for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I
am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed
its growing power once more. I say, "After Stephane
Mallarme1, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau,
after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse,
after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after
the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible ?
After us the Savage God."

BOOK V
THE STIRRING OE THE BONES

THE STIRRING OF THE BONES

'••>.' ,v$ ><J :•'.:" •'

IT may have been the Spring of 1897 that Maud
Gonne, who was passing through London, told me
that for some reason unknown to her, she had failed
to get a Dublin authorization for an American lectur-
ing tour. The young Dublin Nationalists planned a
monument to Wolfe Tone which, it was hoped, might
exceed in bulk and in height that of the too compro-
mised and compromising Daniel O'Connell, and she
proposed to raise money for it by these lectures. I
had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Blooms-
bury, and in Bloomsbury lived important London
Nationalists, elderly doctors, who had been medical
students during the Fenian movement. So I was able
to gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary
resolution. She had no sooner sailed than I found out
why the Dublin committee had refused it, or rather
put it off by delay and vague promises. A prominent
Irish American had been murdered for political
reasons, and another Irish American had been tried
and acquitted, but was still accused by his political
opponents, and the dispute had spread to London
and to Ireland, and had there intermixed itself with
current politics and gathered new bitterness. My
committee, and the majority of the Nationalist Irish
Societies throughout England were upon one side,

and the Dublin committee and the majority of the
P 225

Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon the other, and
feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends
that I had, and the Dublin committee could not be
made to understand that whatever money she collected
would go to the movement, and not to her friends
and their opponents. It seemed to me that if I
accepted the Presidency of the '98 Commemoration
Association of Great Britain, I might be able to
prevent a public quarrel, and so make a great central
council possible; and a public quarrel I did prevent,
though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at
least one active man assured me that I had taken the
heart out of his work, and no gain at all perhaps to
the movement, for our central council had commonly
to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets,
that both parties might be represented when one
pamphlet or one organizer had served.

n

IT was no business of mine, and that was precisely
why I could not keep out of it. Every enterprise
that offered, allured just in so far as it was not my
business. I still think that in a species of man,
wherein I count myself, nothing so much matters as
Unity of Being, but if I seek it as Goethe sought, who
was not of that species, I but combine in myself, and
perhaps as it now seems, looking backward, in others
also, incompatibles. Goethe, in whom objectivity and
subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as the dark is
mixed with the light at the eighteenth Lunar Phase,
could but seek it as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intel-
lectually, critically, and through a multitude of

227

deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms of
skill gathered as if for a collector's cabinet; whereas
true Unity of Being, where all the nature murmurs
in response if but a single note be touched, is found
emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all
experience not of the right quality, and by the limita-
tion of its quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for
I saw the world by the light of what my father had
said, speaking about some Frenchman who frequented
the dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the
interest of that Unity. My father had mocked, but
had not explained why he had mocked, and I, for my
unhappiness had felt a shuddering fascination. Nor
did I understand as yet how little that Unity, how-
ever wisely sought, is possible without a Unity of
Culture in class or people that is no longer possible
at all.

" The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart."

Ill

I WENT hither and thither speaking at meetings in
England and Scotland and occasionally at tumultuous
Dublin conventions, and endured some of the worst
months of my life. I had felt years before that I
had made a great achievement when the man who
trained my uncle's horses invited me to share his
Xmas dinner, which we roasted in front of his harness
room fire ; and now I took an almost equal pride in an
evening spent with some small organizer into whose

spitoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey.
I constantly hoped for some gain in self-possession,
in rapidity of decision, in capacity for disguise, and
am at this moment, I dare say, no different for it
all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree.

When Maud Gonne returned she became our
directing mind both in England and in Ireland, and
it was mainly at her bidding that our movement be-
come a protest against the dissensions, the lack of
dignity, of the Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite parties,
who had fought one another for seven or eight years,
till busy men passed them by, as they did those per-
forming cats that in my childhood I used to see,
pretending to spit at one another on a table, outside
Charing Cross station. Both parliamentary parties
seeing that all young Ireland, and a good part of
old, were in the movement, tried to join us, the Anti-
Parnellite without abandoning its separate identity.
They were admitted I think, but upon what terms I
do not remember. I and two or three others had to meet
Michael Davitt, and a member of parliament called
F. X. O'Brien to talk out the question of separate
identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but
the manner and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed
hardly more unfitted for such negotiation, perhaps
even for any possible present politics, than I myself,
and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by
the way a man sits in his chair if he have emotional
intensity, and Davitt's suggested to me a writer, a
painter, an artist of some kind, rather than a man of
action. Then, too, F. X. O'Brien did not care whether
he used a good or a bad argument, whether he seemed
a fool or a clever man, so that he carried his point,
but if he used a bad argument Davitt would bring
our thought back to it though he had to wait several

229

minutes and re-state it. One felt that he had lived
always with small unimaginative, effective men whom
he despised; and that perhaps through some lack of
early education, perhaps because nine years' imprison-
ment at the most plastic period of his life had jarred
or broken his contact with reality, he had failed,
except during the first months of the Land League,
to dominate those men. He told me that if the split in
the Irish Party had not come he would have carried the
Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for
Ireland as much of Scotland as was still Gaelic in
blood or in language. Our negotiations, which in-
terested so much F. X. O'Brien and my two negotia-
tors, a barrister and a doctor, bored him I thought,
even more than they did me, to whom they were a
novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical
foundation and its vague possibilities excited him, and
it seemed to me that what we said or did stirred him,
at other moments also, to some similar remote thought
and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a
little before his death he replied to some words of con-
gratulation I sent him after the speech in which he
resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an
account of some project of his for improving the
quality of the Irish representation there.

IV

I THINK that he shared with poet and philosopher
the necessity of speaking fhe whole mind or remaining
silent or ineffective, and he had been for years in
a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend
of mine, it was as essential to carry the heart upon

280

the sleeve as the tongue in the cheek. The founders
of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the
doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignor-
ant men will not work for an idea, or feel a political
passion for its own sake, and that you must find " a
lever" as it was called, some practical grievance; and
I do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this
faith in " levers," universal among revolutionaries, is
but a result of that mechnical philosophy of the
Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said,
turned the human mind into the quicksilver at the
back of a mirror, though it still permits a work of art
to seem " a mirror dawdling along a road."

O'Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto
published. A prominent Irish American, not long
released from the prison where Fenianism had
sent him, cabled to Parnell : — " Take up Land
Reform side by side with the National Question and
we will support you. See Kickham." What had
Parnell, a landowner and a haughty man, to do with
the peasant or the peasant's grievance? And he was
indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham,
novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people
would take up a land agitation, and Kickham
answered : — " I am only afraid they would go to the
Gates of Hell for it;" and O'Leary's comment was,
" and so they have."

And so was founded an agitation where some men
pretended to national passion for the land's sake;
some men to agrarian passion for the nation's sake;
some men to both for their own advancement, and
this agitation at the time I write of had but old men
to serve it, who found themselves after years of labour,
some after years of imprisonment, derided for un-
scrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were,

for they had grown up amid make-believe, and now be-
cause their practical grievance was too near settlement
to blind and to excite, their make-believe was visible
to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never
indeed shared anything in common but the senti-
mental imagery, the poetical allusions inherited from
a still earlier generation, but were faced by a genera-
tion that had turned against all oratory. I recall to
my memory a member of Parliament who had fought
for Parnell's policy after Parnell's death, and much
against his own interest, who refused to attend a meet-
ing my friends had summoned at the declaration of
the Boer War, because he thought " England was in
the right," and yet a week later when the Dublin mob
had taken the matter up, advised Irish soldiers
to shoot their officers and join President Kruger. I
recall another and more distinguished politician who
supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining
years, and in his vigorous years had raked up some
scandal about some Colonial Governor. A friend of
mine, after advising that Governor's son to write
his father's life, had remembered the scandal and
called in her alarm upon the politician ; "I do be-
seech you," he had said and with the greatest earnest-
ness, "to pay no attention whatever to anything I may
have said during an election."

Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid
aside, were excellent talkers, genial and friendly men,
with memories enriched by country humour, and much
half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at
moments by poetical feeling that was not all an
affectation, found very moving by English sympath-
isers, of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye. They
may even have had more sincerity than their sort
elsewhere, but they had inherited a cause that men

232

had died for, and they themselves had gone to jail
for it, and had so worn their hereditary martyrdom
that they had seemed for a time no common men,
and now must pay the penalty. " I have just told
Mahaffy," Wilde had said to me, " that it is a party
of men of genius," and now John O'Leary, Taylor,
and many obscure sincere men had pulled them down ;
and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that
thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as more
clearly out of the common? A movement first of
poetry, then of sentimentality, and land hunger, had
struggled with, and as the nation passed into the
second period of all revolutions, had given way before
a movement of abstraction and hatred ; and after some
twenty years of the second period, though abstraction
and hatred have won their victory, there is no clear
sign, of a third, a tertium quid, and a reasonable frame
of mind.

Seeing that only the individual soul can
attain to its spiritual opposite, a nation in
tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical
opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites
may acquire sex and engender. At moments when
I have thought of the results of political subjection
upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by
Oscar Wilde who professed to have found it in a
book of magic, " if you carve a Cerberus upon an
emerald," he said, " and put it in the oil of a lamp
and carry it into a room where your enemy is, two
heads will come upon his shoulders and devour one
another."

Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental
rhetoric with every man who had found a practical
grievance, whether one care a button for the griev-
ance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics.

233

Nationality was like religion, few could be saved, and
meditation had but one theme — the perfect nation
and its perfect service. " Public opinion," said an
anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, " will
compel you to learn Irish," and it certainly did com-
pel many persons of settled habits to change tailor
and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to
public opinion, until a letter of apology from my
tailor informed me that " It takes such a long time
getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the way
from Scotland."

The Ireland of men's affections must be, as it were,
self-moving, self-creating, though as yet (avoiding a
conclusion that seemed hopeless) but few added
altogether separate from England politically. Men for
the moment were less concerned with the final achieve-
ment than with independence from English parties and
influence during the struggle for it. We had no
longer any leaders, abstractions were in their place;
and our Conventions, where O'Leary presided inter-
rupting discussion without the least consideration for
rules of procedure when the moment came for his cup
of coffee, were dominated by little groups, the Gaelic
propagandists, though still very few, being the most
impassioned, which had the intensity and narrowness
of theological sects.

I had in my head a project to reconcile old and new
that gave Maud Gonne and myself many stirring con-
versations upon journeys by rail to meetings in Scot-
land, in Dublin, or in the Midlands. Should we not
persuade the organizations in Dublin and in London,
when the time drew near for the unveiling of our
statue, or even perhaps for the laying of its founda-
tion stone, to invite the leaders of Parnellite or Anti-
Parnellite, of the new group of Unionists who had

234

almost changed sides in their indignation at the over-
taxation of Ireland, to lay their policy before our
Convention — could we not then propose and carry that
the Convention sit permanently, or appoint some
Executive Committee to direct Irish policy and report
from time to time. The total withdrawal from West-
minster had been proposed in the 'Seventies, before
the two devouring heads were of equal strength, and
now that the abstract head seemed the strongest,
would be proposed again, but the Convention could
send them thither, not as an independent power, but
as its delgation, and only when, and for what purpose
the Convention might decide. I dreaded some wild
Fenian movement, and with literature perhaps more
in my mind than politics, dreamed of that Unity of
Culture which might begin with some few men con-
trolling some form of administration. I began to
talk my project over with various organizers, who
often interrupted their attention which was perhaps
only politeness, with some new jibe at Mr. Dillon or
Mr. Redmond. I thought I had Maud Gonne's sup-
port, but when I overheard her conversation, she
commonly urged the entire withdrawal of the Irish
Members, or if she did refer to my scheme, it was
to suggest the sending to England of eighty ragged
and drunken Dublin beggars or eighty pugilists " to
be paid by results."

She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-
publicly of the withdrawal of the Irish Members as a
practical policy for our time, so far as I know, but
others may have been considering it. A nation in
crisis becomes almost like a single mind, or rather
like those minds I have described that become chan-
nels for parallel streams of thought, each stream tak-
ing the colour of the mind it flows through. These

235

streams are not set moving, as I think, through con-
versation or publication, but through " telepathic
contact " at some depth below that of normal con-
sciousness, and it is only years afterwards, when future
events have shown the themes' importance, that
we discover that they are different expressions of a
common theme. That self-moving, self-creating
nation necessitated an Irish centre of policy, and I
planned a premature impossible peace between those
two devouring heads because I was sedentary and
thoughtful ; but Maud Gonne was not sedentary, and
I noticed that before some great event she did not
think but became exceedingly superstitous. Are not
such as she aware, at moments of great crisis, of some
power beyond their own minds ; or are they like some
good portrait painter of my father's generation and
only think when the model is under their eye? Once
upon the eve of some demonstration, I found her with
many caged larks and finches which she was about to
set free for the luck's sake.

I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young
men, not yet educated by Mr. Birrell's university,
would certainly shout down everyone they disagreed
with, and that their finance was so extravagant that
we must content ourselves with a foundation stone and
an iron rail to protect it, for there could never be a
statue; while she carried out every plan she made.

Her power over crowds was at its height, and some
portion of the power came because she could still,
even when pushing an abstract principle to what
seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free,
and so when men and women did her bidding they
did it not only because she was beautiful, but be-
cause that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides
there was an element in her beauty that moved minds

full of old Gaelic stories and poems, for she looked as
though she lived in an ancient civilization where all
superiorities whether of the mind or the body were
a part of public ceremonial, were in some way the
crowd's creation, as the Pope entering the Vatican is
the crowd's creation. Her beauty, backed by her
great stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and
not as often with our stage beauties because obvious
and florid, for it was incredibly distinguished, and if
— as must be that it might seem that assembly's very
self, fused, unified, and solitary — her face, like the
face of some Greek statue, showed little thought, her
whole body seemed a master work of long labouring
thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calcu-
lated, consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathema-
ticians out of Babylon, that he might outface even
Artemisia's sepulchral image with a living norm.

But in that ancient civilization abstract thought
scarce existed, while she but rose partially and for a
moment out of raging abstraction; and for that
reason, as I have known another woman do, she hated
her own beauty, not its effect upon others, but its
image in the mirror. Beauty is from the antithetical
self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only
does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for
the denial or the dissolution of the self.

" How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul,
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole
Beyond hearing and seeing
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?"

237

ON the morning of the great procession, the greatest
in living memory, the Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite
members of Parliament, huddled together like cows in
a storm, gather behind our carriage, and I hear John
Redmond say to certain of his late enemies, " I went
up nearer the head of the Procession, but one of the
Marshals said, * This is not your place, Mr Redmond ;
your place is further back.' ' No,' I said, * I will
stay here.' ' In that case,' he said, ' I will lead you
back.' " Later on I can see by the pushing and
shouldering of a delegate from South Africa how im-
portant place and precedure is; and noticing that
Maud Gonne is cheered everywhere, and that the Irish
Members march through street after street without
welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended
their humiliation.

We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John
Dillon is making the first speech he has made before
a popular Dublin audience since the death of Parnell ;
and I have several times to keep my London delegates
from interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I
watch him the abstract passion begins to rise within
me, and I am almost overpowered by an instinct of
cruelty; I long to cry out, "Had Zimri peace who
slew his master?"

Is our Foundation Stone still unlaid when the more
important streets are decorated for Queen Victoria's
Jubilee ?

I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young
working-man who looks very melancholy. She had
offered to speak at one of the regular meetings of his
socialist society about Queen Victoria, and he has
summoned what will be a great meeting in the open
air. She has refused to speak, and he says that her
refusal means his ruin, as nobody will ever believe
that he had any promise at all. When he has left
without complaint or anger, she gives me very cogent
reasons against the open air meeting, but I can think
of nothing but the young man and his look of
melancholy. He has left his address, and presently
at my persuasion, she drives to his tenement, where
she finds him and his wife and children crowded into
a very small space — perhaps there was only one room
— and, moved by the sight, promises to speak. The
young man is James Connolly who, with Padraic
Pearce, is to make the Insurrection of 1916 and to be
executed.

The meeting is held in College Green and is very
crowded, and Maud Gonne speaks, I think, standing
upon a chair. In front of her is an old woman with a
miniature of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, which she waves
in her excitement, crying out, " I was in it before
.she was born." Maud Gonne tells how that morning
she had gone to lay a wreath upon a martyr's tomb
at St. Michael's Church, for it is the one day in the
year when such wreaths are laid, but has been
refused admission because it is the Jubilee. Then she
pauses, and after that her voice rises to a cry, " Must
the graves of our dead go undecorated because
Victoria has her Jubilee?"

239

It is eight or nine at night, and she and I have come
from the City Hall, where the Convention has been
sitting, that we may walk to the National Club in Rut-
land Square, and we find a great crowd in the street,
who surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear
a sound of breaking glass, the crowd has begun to
stone the windows of decorated houses, and when I
try to speak that I may restore order, I discover that
I have lost my voice through much speaking at the
Convention. I can only whisper and gesticulate, and
as I am thus freed from responsibility, I share the
emotion of the crowd, and perhaps even feel as they
feel when the glass crashes. Maud Gonne has a look
of exultation as she walks with her laughing head
thrown back.

Later that night Connolly carries in procession a
coffin with the words " British Empire " upon it,
and police and mob fight for its ownership, and at
last that the police may not capture, it is thrown
into the Liffey. And there are fights between police
and window-breakers, and I read in the morning
papers that many have been wounded; some two
hundred heads have been dressed at the hospitals; an
old woman killed by baton blows, or perhaps
trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two
thousand pounds worth of decorated plate glass win-
dows have been broken. I count the links in the chain
of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and
wonder if any link there is from my workshop.

Queen Victoria visits the city, and Dublin Unionists
have gathered together from all Ireland some twelve
thousand children and built for them a grandstand,
and bought them sweets and buns that they may

240

cheer. A week later Maud Gonne marches forty
thousand children through the streets of Dublin, and
in a field beyond Drumcondra, and in the presence of
a Priest of their Church, they swear to cherish towards
England until the freedom of Ireland has been won,
an undying enmity.

How many of these children will carry bomb or
rifle when a little under or a little over thirty?

Feeling is still running high between the Dublin
and London organizations, for a London doctor, my
fellow-delegate, has called a little after breakfast to
say he was condemned to death by a certain secret
society the night before. He is very angry, though
it does not seem that his life is in danger, for the
insult is beyond endurance.

We arrive at Chancery Lane for our Committee
meeting, but it is Derby Day, and certain men who
have arranged a boxing match are in possession of
our rooms. We adjourn to a neighbouring public-
house where there are little pannelled cubicles as in
an old-fashioned eating house, that we may direct the
secretary how to answer that week's letters. We are
much interrupted by a committee man who has been
to the Derby, and now, half lying on the table, keeps
repeating, " I know what you all think. Let us hand
on the torch, you think, let us hand it on to our
children, but I say no ! I say, let us order an immedi-
ate rising."

Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to
apologise it seems, and to explain that we had not

241

been recognized. He begins his apology but stops,
and for a moment fixes upon us a meditative critical
eye. "No, I will not," he cries. "What do I
care for anyone now but Venus and Adonis and the
other Planets of Heaven."

French sympathisers have been brought to see the
old buildings in Galway, and with the towns of
Southern France in their mind's eye, are not in the
least moved. The greater number are in a small
crowded hotel. Presently an acquaintance of mine,
peeping, while it is still broad day, from his bedroom
window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall
door, and in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dub-
lin barrister, with a little boy who carries from a stick
over his shoulder twelve chamber pots. He hears one
angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice, " But,
Madam, I feel certain that at the unexpected arrival
of so many guests, so many guests of the Nation, I
may say, you must have found yourself unprepared."
" Never have I been so insulted." "Madam, I am
thinking of the honour of my country."

I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian
sympathiser Cipriani, the friend of Garibaldi, is there,
and though an old man now, he is the handsome&L
man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in
English at one end of the room, and he is talking
politics in French at the* other. Somebody says,
" Yeats believes in ghosts," and Cipriani interrupts
for a moment his impassioned declamation to say in
Q

242

English, and with a magnificent movement and intona-
tion, " As for me, I believe in nothing but cannon."

I call at the office of the Dublin organization in
Westmoreland Street, and find the front door open,
and the office door open, and though the office is
empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds
in gold upon the shelf.

At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-
aged man who slips into the room for a moment,
whispers something to the secretary, lays three
or four shillings on a table, and slips out. I am told
that he is an Irish board-school teacher who, in early
life, took an oath neither to drink nor smoke, but to
contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish
Cause.

VI

A FEW months before I was drawn into politics, I
made a friendship that was to make possible that old
project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons and I
were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with
Mr. Edward Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I
had met once in London for a few minutes drove over,
and after Symon's return to London I stayed at her
house, which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was

243

in poor health, the strain of youth had been greater
than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, who
must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost
myself besides as I had done periodically for years,
upon Hodos Camelionis. The first time was in my
eighteenth or nineteenth years, when I tried to create
a more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had
got there through a novel that I could neither write
nor cease to write which had Hodos Camelionis for
its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern
visionary sects pass before his bewildered eyes, as
Flaubert's St. Anthony saw the Christian sects, and I
was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief person
to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not
love order, or. that I lack capacity for it, but that —
and not in the arts and in thought only — I outrun
my strength. It is not so much that I choose too many
elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem
without number, like those angels, that in Henry
More's paraphrase of the Schoolman's problem, dance
spurred and booted upon the point of a needle.
Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but
what can one do when the age itself has come to
Hodos Camelionis ?

Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me
from cottage to cottage to gather folk-belief, tales of
the fairies, and the like, and wrote down herself what
we had gathered, considering that this work, in which
one let others talk, and walked about the fields so
much, would lie, to use a country phrase, " Very
light upon the mind." She asked me to return there
the next year, and for years to come I was to spend
my summers at her house.* When I was in good health
again, I found myself indolent, partly perhaps because
I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked

244

her to send me to my work every day at eleven, and
at some other hour to my letters, rating me with idle-
ness if need be, and I doubt if I should have done
much with my life but for her firmness and her care.
After a time, though not very quickly, I recovered
tolerable industry, though it has only been of late
years that I have found it possible to face an hour's
verse without a preliminary struggle and much
putting off.

Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney
Rock and those above the waterfall at Ben Bulben,
though I shall never perhaps walk there again, are so
deep in my affections that I dream about them at
night; and yet the woods at Coole, though they do
not come into my dream are so much more knitted to
my thought, that when I am dead they will have, I am
persuaded, my longest visit. When we are dead,
according to my belief, we live our lives backward for
a certain number of years, treading the paths that
we have trodden, growing young again, even childish
again, till some attain an innocence that is no longer
a mere accident of nature, but the human intellect's
crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first
few simple thoughts that now, grown complex,
through their contact with other thoughts, explain
the world, came to me from beyond my own mind.
I practised meditations, and these, as I think, so
affected my sleep that I began to have dreams that
differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take
place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable
coherence, and certain half-dreams, if I can call them
so, between sleep and waking. I have noticed that
such experiences come to me most often amid distrac-
tion, at some time that seems of all times the least
fitting, as though it were necessary for the exterior

245

mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was during 1897
and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or
just setting out to some political meeting, that the
first dreams came. I was crossing a little stream near
Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride
from bank to bank, when an emotion never ex-
perienced before swept down upon me. I said, " That
is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he
surrenders his will to the will of God." I felt an
extreme surprise for my whole imagination was pre-
occupied with the pagan mythology of ancient Ire-
land, I was marking in red ink upon a large map,
every sacred mountain. The next morning I awoke
near dawn, to hear a voice saying, " The love of God
is infinite for every human soul because every human
soul is unique, no other can satisfy the same need in
God."

Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of
changelings, grown men and women as well as children,
who as the people believe are taken by the fairies,
some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their
likeness remaining in their stead, and I constantly
asked myself what reality there could be in these tales,
often supported by so much testimony. I woke one
night to find myself lying upon my back with all my
iimbs rigid, and to hear a ceremonial measured voice
which did not seem to be mine speaking through my
lips, " We make an image of him who sleeps," it
said, " and it is not him who sleeps, and we
call it Emmanuel." After many years that thought,
others often found as strangely being added to it,
became the thought of the Mask, which I have used
in these memoirs to explain men's characters. A few
months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it
should be "An image of him who sleeps," and took

246

down from the shelf not knowing why I was doing so,
a book which I had never read, Burkitt's Early
Eastern Christianity, and opened it at random. My
eyes lit upon a passage from a Gnostic Hymn telling
how a certain King's son being exiled, slept in Egypt,
a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an
Angel brought him a royal mantle ; and at the bottom
of the page I found a footnote saying that the word
mantle did not represent the meaning properly for
that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form
and likeness. I did not, however, find in the Gnostic
Hymn my other thought that Egypt and that which
the Mask represents are antithetical. That, I think,
became clear, though I had had some premonitions
when a countryman told Lady Gregory and myself
that he had heard the crying of new-dropped lambs
in November — Spring in the world of Fairy, being
November with us.

On the sea coast at Duras, a few miles from Coole,
an old French Count, Florimond de Bastero, lived for
certain months in every year. Lady Gregory and I
talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking
out upon the lawn of his house, watching a large
flock of ducks that was always gathered for his arrival
from Paris, and that would be a very small flock, if
indeed it were a flock at all, when he set out for Rome
in the autumn. I told her that I had given up my
project because it was impossible to get the few pounds
necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to
collect or give the money necessary. That was her
first great service to the Irish intellectual movement.
She reminded me the other day that when she first
asked me what she could do to help our movement I

247

suggested nothing; and, certainly, no more foresaw
her genius that I foresaw that of John Synge, nor had
she herself foreseen it. Our theatre had been estab-
lished before she wrote or had any ambition to write,
and yet her little comedies have merriment and
beauty, an unusual combination, and those two
volumes where the Irish heroic tales are arranged and
translated in an English so simple and so noble, may
do more than other books to deepen Irish imagina-
tion. They contain our ancient literature, are some-
thing better than our Mabinogion, are almost our
Morte D3 Arthur. It is more fitting, however, that in
a book of memoirs I should speak of her personal
influence, and especially as no witness is likely to
arise better qualified to speak. If that influence were
lacking, Ireland would be greatly impoverished, so
much has been planned out in the library, or among
the woods at Coole ; for it was there that John Shawe
Taylor found the independence from class and family
that made him summon the conference between land-
lord and tenant, that brought land purchase, and it
was there that Hugh Lane formed those Irish ambi-
tions that led to his scattering many thousands, and
gathering much ingratitude; and where, but for that
conversation at Florimond de Bastero's, had been the
genius of Synge?

I have written these words instead of leaving all to
posterity, and though my friend's ear seems indifferent
to praise or blame, that young men to whom recent
events are often more obscure than those long past,
may learn what debts they owe and to what creditor.

END.

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